In a minor degree its celibacy is anti-socialistic; whatever relation of the sexes the Socialist may advocate, he certainly advocates some form of intimate relation. And the Socialist would not for a moment sanction the withdrawal of a large number of citizens from every civic duty on the plea that they were more interested in another world. He would not exempt a large number of able-bodied men from labour on the plea that they were ‘waterspouts of divine grace’ or ‘lightning conductors of divine wrath’ for their sinful brethren. He would be impatient of all indolence, and mendicancy, and parasitism of any complexion.
However, the parallel has never been very seriously entertained, and does not merit further criticism. Monasticism has neither interest nor advantage for the modern world; it is an enfeebled and corrupted survival of an institution whose congenial environment seems to have disappeared. Even in the stern monasteries of Trappists and Carthusians, where it still retains its full rigour of asceticism and solitude, it alienates the sympathy of the modern world; merit is now thought to consist in the fulfilment of the whole duty of man, in works that produce visible fruit, and that tend to remove the actual evils of life. But, for the majority of the monastic bodies, with their indolent withdrawal from life’s difficulties and duties, without any real compensating virtue, or with their pitiful compromise between external occupation and their antiquated theories of detachment, one cannot
