Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/261

Rh materially from their Belgian neighbours. France approaches more to the Southern type. On the whole, the Spanish and Italian provinces maintain a more rigorous discipline and are less material than their Northern brethren. Still, one can hardly say they are more spiritual in the religious sense: they are notoriously idle, and full of petty ambition and intrigue with their attendant strife and mutual hostility. I have met friars from all parts of the world, and there is a remarkable identity of features in their polyglot narrative.

Something has been said, too, in the ninth chapter, about other religious orders—enough to found an assumption that all are in an analogous condition. And, indeed, such a presumption needs but little, if any, positive proof: it is hardly likely that Rome would tolerate an unusual corruption of one particular monastic order. In spite of their great diversity of character and aim the same forces are at work in each. In fact, the various monastic congregations have so far lost sight of the special purposes for which they were severally founded, that they differ from the ordinary clergy in little more than dress and community-life and ceremonies. The orders which, like the Franciscan, were founded for the purpose of caring for the poor and embodying voluntary poverty in their own lives, are found to be continually seeking a higher level—vying with each other for the patronage of the rich (wherever they can escape the Jesuits), and always