Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/11

Rh thought to see the dead bones of the monks re-clothed with flesh as to see any great revival of their institutions. No doubt the system would die hard in countries that had resisted the angry Teutonic rebellion against Roman authority, but even in the warm lands of the South it was visibly decaying; never more would a Savonarola or a Jacobo della Marchia strike fire in the hearts of a multitude. Ecclesiasticism had become a profession, like the priesthood in later Judea or Greece or Rome, and it must be conducted on sober business lines at the risk of becoming distasteful.

In point of fact, however, there has been a revival of monastic institutions in our midst, proportionate to the revival of Roman Catholicism. A hundred years ago England flattered itself that the monastic spirit—if not Popery itself—was extinguished for ever within its ocean frontiers: the few survivors of the old orders were still proscribed and crept stealthily about the land in strange disguises. Then the French refugees surreptitiously re-introduced it—just as they brought over large quantities of the hated 'Popish baubles' in their huge boxes, which, on the king's secret instructions, passed the custom house untouched. The long Irish immigration set in, and the zeal of the aliens kept pace with growing British tolerance. The removal of Catholic disabilities, the Oxford movement, and the establishment of the hierarchy followed in quick succession, and, as Catholicism spread rapidly