Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/14

8 sceptical age. She still holds up the loftiest Christian ideals to humanity, and her children embrace them in thousands.

And the monastic orders have been dragged also into the seething waters of the social problem. Now that Socialism has forced its way through the serried ranks of theologians and philosophers into the arena of honourable discussion, it has met with the usual solemn consecration from the Church, like Darwinism or the Higher Criticism. Christ is discovered to have been a Socialist: the early Church a model Socialistic community. And in proof that the Church did not abandon the Socialistic teaching of its founder under the shadow of imperial patronage and in the possession of regal power, monasticism is held up as an object lesson in Socialism that has never been absent from the Church. No doubt it is strange that the monks themselves, twenty or thirty years ago, anathematised Socialistic ideas as fervently as the rest of the faithful, but monks have never been the wisest section of the Church.

The most unpromising feature of the controversies that have thus arisen with regard to monasticism is that the disputants on both sides are deplorably ignorant of the true condition of monasteries. The Catholic layman, to whom the task of defending them is usually committed—it would be indelicate for the monks and nuns to defend themselves—usually knows as much of the interior and the régime of English