Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/267

 majority of the inmates of monastic institutions may be divided, as is clear from the preceding, into two categories. One is the category of those who are religiously inclined, but whose whole merit consists in the equivocal virtue of having bound themselves to a certain system of religious services, through which they pass mechanically and with much resignation, and which they alleviate by as much harmless pleasure and distraction as they can procure. The other category, and, perhaps, the larger one, consists of those who seem to have exhausted their moral heroism in the taking of the vows; for the rest of their lives (and one of the most remarkable features of monks of all classes is the anxiety they show to prolong their 'earthly exile'—doubtless in a penitential spirit) they chafe under the discipline they have undertaken, modify it and withdraw from it as much as possible, and add to it as much 'worldly' pleasure as circumstances permit. Both categories lead lives of ordinary morality—but only ordinary, so that the garments of the saints sit very incongruously on their shoulders, to the ordinary observer; they seem to appreciate the good things of this life as keenly as ordinary mortals, and shrink from death as naively as if death meant annihilation instead of entrance into Paradise.

Thus, on the one hand, certain anti-papal lecturers err in representing monasticism, as a body, as an institution of a particularly dark character; on