Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/9

Rh a growing self-consciousness has made it more careful and introspective; the vision of hereafter has become blurred and indistinct. A large part—if not the larger part—of our latter day prophets, either abandon all hope of ever grasping the fading and intangible vision, or, at the most, pronounce it to be the unfaithful and distorted mirage of an inexplorable region. For the vast majority it has lost all the sharpness of outline and all the warmth of colour that once made it so potent an agency in human life. Compromise is the word. It may be true: and if the churches will temper their strictures so that they do less violence to present aims and ideals—well, like Pascal, men will remain on the safe side. But the age of martyrs, the age of Crusaders, the age of public penance, and even of private mortification, must hope for no revival. The sterner dictates of supernaturalism must be explained away as unsuited to a more sensitive and a more energetic age, or as a blunder in exegetics on the part of a less enlightened generation.

Hence, when, a few years ago, Dr. St. George Mivart, a writer of much eminence and erudition, confessed that he looked forward to a rejuvenescence of the religious orders of the thirteenth century, he was greeted with a smile of incredulity outside the narrow sphere of his own co-religionists. That Dr. Mivart, ardent evolutionist as he is, should cling to