Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/266

260 passed at once and instinctively from deep fervour to great ascetical rigour is rarely found now in educated spheres; and that very fervour and keen faith is rarer still in this age of universal soul-disturbing scepticism. It is an age of compromise; moral heroism (such, at least, as is dependent on theological sanctions) is rare, and, as only moral heroes can faithfully live the ideal monastic life, true monasticism is likewise rare.

Such a presumption is clearly borne out by the description of monastic life in many spheres which has preceded. The idyllic life of the monk, a life of prayer and toil and unworldliness or other-worldliness, does not exist to any great extent outside the pages of Catholic apologists and a few non-Catholic poets. The forms of monasticism remain, but the spirit is almost departed from them; one is forcibly reminded of that passage of Carlyle where he speaks of institutions as fair masks under which, instead of fair faces, one catches a glimpse of shuddering corruption. Not that monasticism, judged apart from its profession, is an object of special moral reprobation; its fault, its title to contempt, lies rather in its continued profession of an ideal from which it has hopelessly fallen, and in its constant effort to hide that discrepancy.

There are, of course, isolated members who are deeply corrupted in monasteries and nunneries, as in every other sphere; and there are, also, many individuals of an unusually high character. But the vast