Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/264

258 and of critical literature was unknown, and tradition was a paramount authority, so that men were not only chronologically nearer to the great drama of the foundation of Christianity, but accepted the traditional version with unquestioning confidence.

However, even in the middle ages, monasticism was no purer an institution than it is now. Soon after the foundation of the several orders there begins the long history of corruptions, reforms, and schisms inside the order, and of papal and episcopal fulminations and historical impeachments from without. Long before the death of Francis of Assisi his order was deeply corrupted; indeed, his own primitive companions had made him tear up, or had torn up for him, the first version of his rule, and it was only by the intrigue of certain patrons at Rome that he secured the papal assent to his second rule. And scarcely had the supreme command passed, during Francis’ lifetime, into the hands of Fr. Elias, than a powerful party of moderates arose, and dissension, intrigue, and schism threw the entire body into a fever of agitation. Elias was a clever and ambitious friar, with a much wider acquaintance with human nature and much less ascetical fervour than Francis; the manner of life which he advocated was, like that of modern monks, much more sensible—his error was, also like that of the moderns, to cling to the original profession. And that struggle of human nature against the unnatural standard of life it had somehow adopted has never