Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/18



pre-Rationalistic days a description of the means of recruiting the monastic orders (and the clergy generally) would have been simplicity itself. The vocation to that higher state was invariably attributed to a special interposition of Providence; the individual soul heard a Divine call, and had but to obey and be thankful for the choice. But in later years a remarkable tendency has developed, even in the sanctuary, to respectfully exclude Providence from the arrangement of sublunary matters. One or two successful revolutions helped men to realise that royalty was not a divine institution; Providence was exonerated from the control of the political world. Now, the economic world and the hierarchy of society seem in danger of being handed over to the play of ‘natural causes’; it is seriously doubted, even by many ecclesiastics, whether the distribution of wealth is an immutable divine arrangement after all. Even in sacred literature the divine influence is gradually fading from view; verbal inspiration is, of course, a hopeless fossil, and inspiration of any kind is growing