in most cases only too well rid of this tearful and miserable world, and of an enslaved and unnatural if not altogether wasted life.
Whatever were the vices of those great armies of celibates who fought the battle of the Church during the Middle Ages, whatever their ambition, voluptuousness, gluttony, and avarice, their greatest enemy must own that we owe them much for the learning they hoarded, the education they encouraged, the charity they displayed, and the buildings they reared. Who can stand up and say that the builders of such churches as York Minster and Salisbury Cathedral were mere half-transmuted pagans? Was there no worship of the soul in the men who reared that pile and raised those towers—who hollowed those cloisters and carved those altars?
It is not for us to point out the faults of those men. Who are we, to judge of their vices or their sins? It is a sufficient proof that the monastic system was a necessary phase of Christianity that the monastic system existed. It was not the finger of a poor monk that could stop the rolling world. These convents were the fortresses of piety; their system was the reaction of sword-law, violence, and rapine. St. Bernard and King John, Rochester and Penn, St. Paul and Tiberius, Wesley and Wilkes, such are the typified reactions of every age. The very pastimes of these men were useful to ourselves. From the madness of alchemy sprang modern chemistry; from the dreams of astrology the certainties of astronomy. Faraday and Chaucer's "Cheat with the Alembec," Galeotti and Newton, had still something in common. To the monks' scholastic theology we owe the preservation of Aristotle; and the labours of their copiers saved Homer and Plato from the fate of Ennius and Sappho. Their ideal was too perfect for our nature yet. They were the first missionaries and the first colonizers—the defenders of the serf, the educators of the poor. The monk and the knight were necessary phases of a civilization dangerous and ridiculous only when their use was past. Every nation has given its art some peculiar attribute of divinity. That of the Mexican was terror, that of the Greek beauty, of the Egyptian repose, of the Assyrian power, of the monks love. Their faults were of their age. We should no more complain of St. Bernard preaching the crusade than we should of Elizabeth filling her prisons with the Jesuits, of Cromwell burning the priest, or Calvin drowning the Anabaptist.
For the majority of honest monks the convent was no doubt the whole world, and the cathedral a threshold of heaven. On that high altar, fifty years before, they had made their vow, by that altar they knelt on the eve of death; those huge windows, like the blazoned doors of paradise, had cast on their choir-books half a century of light and shadow. By this shrine they knelt the day when Brother Jerome died. In that cloister they used to pace together, and the greenest spot in the garth is where he lies, waiting for his old comrades in good works. Those great bells in the tower for them had the voices of friends.
Let us be satisfied by owning, then, that the monks were, after all, good and bad like other men, and that they led a more varied and useful life than has been generally imagined. It could not have been a wholly dissolute and selfish class from which such men as Chaucer's good parson sprang. When we read of the dregs of the convent, let us not forget those beautiful lines which paint a man who might have been a friend of Goldsmith's honest vicar.
A good man ther was of religioun,
That was a poure persone of a town:
But rich he was of holy thought and werk.
He was also a lerned man, a clerk,
That Cristes gospel trewely wolde preche.
Benigne he was, and wonder diligent,
And in adversite ful patient.
Wide was his parish, and houses fer asonder,
But he ne left nought for no rain ne thonder,
In sicknesse and in mischief to visite
The ferrest in his parish, moche and lite.
Upon his fete, and in his hand a staf,
This noble ensample to his shepe he yaf,
That first he wrought and afterwards he taught.
He was a shepherd and no mercenarie,
And though he holy were, and vertuous,
He was to sinful men not dispitious,
Ne of his speche dangerous ne digne,
But in his learning discrete and benigne.
To drawen folk to heaven, with fairenesse,
By good example was his besinesse:
But it were any persone obstinat,
What so he were of highe or low estat,
Him wolde he snibben sharply for the nones,
A better priest I trowe that nowther non is.
He waited after no pompe ne reverence,
Ne maked him no spiced conscience,
But Cristes lore, and his apostles twelve,
He taught, but first he folowed it himselve.
