hold a power which, if not wholly spiritual, is certainly not bound by material conditions. They plead the cause of men who, whatever we may think of their type of Christianity, were assuredly no weak and idle dreamers. They set forth the history of great leaders, who saw the end of their labours, and with an unflinching resolution took the wisest, if not the purest means for attaining it.

The

Monasticism and the Papacy are two distinct powers. course of their fortunes seems now to be diverging indefinitely; and the main prop of earlier pontiffs serves but little to uphold the waning glory of the popedom. But for at least a thousand years their fortunes were inextricably united. With the rise or the degeneracy of the great orders also rose and fell the dignity and power of the popes; and with a true instinct the successors of St. Peter took into their special favour the men whom they knew to be the chief bulwarks and champions of their supremacy. And in its turn, the character of the popes, or rather of their designs, and the condition of their spiritual empire, exercised a corresponding influence on the Monastic Orders. The vast interval which separates the disciples of Loyola from those of Dominic and Francis, points to a distinc tion not less great between the Papacy under Innocent the Third and the Papacy after the great ecclesiastical revolution of the West. Almost from the pontificate of Innocent himself, the temporal head of the heavenly empire of Augustine began to sink more and more into the secular prince, in proportion as pretensions not less unbounded were enforced by a weaker will and a more interested policy. The seventy years' captivity' at Avignon converted the popes into mere puppets to the treacherous intrigues of French kings. Later generations saw in them simply men who sought by family alliances to secure their greatness as temporal princes, and to whom the welfare of the Church was as nothing in the balance. It is a fit retribution that the spiritual power, when restricted to men of Italian birth, should forfeit the greatness which pontiffs of other races had strengthened, if not created, that the throne which has been filled by many an illustrious pontiff of Teutonic race, Suidger. and Bruno, Otto, and the English Nicolas, should become contemptible when confined to Italians, destitute of the mental and moral strength which distinguished 'Gregory and Hildebrand, Benedict and Columba.

Of monasticism, under all its legitimate forms and developements, M. de Montalembert comes forward as the determined, and, in his own belief, impartial champion. And assuredly, if partiality be measured by a concealment or extenuation of abuses

and evils, no one could be more triumphantly acquitted of the slightest tendency to such unfairness. For the real degeneracy of the system none could pronounce a more stern and uncompromising condemnation; for the far more venial offences of a rule simply relaxed or modified he is a judge harsher and more severe than we should be, and for an obvious reason. His ideal of monasticism is found where we see simply the working of a false philosophy; in his eyes the system is already on the decline when alone, or most of all, we believe that it was fulfilling a high mission, and winning a title to the gratitude of all ages. By giving our reasons for this belief, we may perhaps remove some of the difficulties which encircle the question; and if we may not hope to convince M. de Montalembert, we trust that we shall at the least make our meaning plain. There is between us so much of common ground in thought and feeling: we sympathise so thoroughly in his hatred of despotism, his love of freedom; we have so hearty an admiration for the great monks of Western Christendom, so firm a belief in the greatness and goodness of their achievements, that our entire divergence in other things points to an essential difference in principle, which no mere appeals to authority will serve either to explain

or to remove.

To the present volumes, which, after a sketch of monasticism in the East, and of its beginnings in the West, under Athanasius, Jerome, and Ambrose, bring us to the confluence of the great rules of Benedict and Columba, is prefixed an elaborate Introduction, which is at once a complete exposition of all the good, and a condemnation of all the evil in the monastic systems of the West. It aspires to do more: it attempts to determine the highest ideal of Christianity, not less than to review the history and principles of all monasticism.

At the outset of his task, M. de Montalembert hastens to overthrow the modern popular notions of monastic life. It is not surprising that these should be as imperfect or as absurd as the popular notions of Greek or Roman civilisation or philosophy. Yet there is something almost ludicrous, after a patient study of the career of Lanfranc or Bernard, of Boniface or Columba, to hear the monastic state spoken of as a mere refuge for broken hearts, where the memory of shattered hopes and crushed affection may be softened into a chronic tranquillity, not cheerful perhaps, yet not intolerable. Disappointment and calamity may in all ages have sent some men into the cloister; but the vast majority of those who abandoned what they called the life of the world were made of sterner stuff and ready for harder work than this.

In truth, the most prominent characteristic of the Western monks is power. Whether in self-discipline, or in the rule of others, they exhibit no vacillation or feebleness of will. In their devotion there is no mere dreaming: in their meditation no mere inaction. The greatest ascetics become the most vigorous of missionaries; the sternest self-tormentors are the most diligent and successful of teachers. In the most trivial detail they believed that there was a work to be done the hours of silent contemplation prepared them the better to accomplish it.

But with this power and force of character were united all other qualities which might win the reverence or the love of mankind. In the full determination of a matured will, with the masculine strength of a vigorous mind, the soldier, to whom the cell was to be as much a battle-field as the world could have been, gave himself solemnly to the life of active prayer and works of mercy. Labouring earnestly in his ceaseless intercession, he was not less earnest in relieving the physical, still more the spiritual, wants of all around him. To the poor of Christ his gates were always open: for their perplexities his counsel was always ready. The temporal aid, which modern states have been obliged to render compulsory, flowed naturally and spontaneously from an inexhaustible charity. Among his fellows were those who had been kings and chieftains, peasants or slaves; and with him all stood on an absolute equality before God. With them he was united by the rule of an unlimited and unquestioning obedience to a spiritual chief, by an entire renunciation of all worldly goods, down to the very clothes which he wore, and the pen with which he wrote. Under the spell of his unwearying labour, savage deserts and unwholesome marshes were changed into blooming gardens and waving corn fields. The peaceful home, on which he lavished every epithet of the most intense affection, became the nucleus of happy homesteads and contented hearths. The hamlets of his dependants clustered peacefully around the great conventual church, which was sometimes the very embodiment of a severe simplicity, more often a storehouse of the highest glories of Christian art. If the fields without bore witness to his bodily industry, his cloister was not less the scene of the most subtle or the most beneficent of intellectual triumphs. From his cell went forth the letters which were to cheer or counsel the vicar of Christ, to rebuke kings and statesmen, to warn and guide the faithful, to recall the wanderer to the fold, and to confound the unbeliever. The intensity of his meditation did not close his senses to the beauties of earth and heaven, the fragrance of

flowers, and the soft murmur of summer breezes. For him the savage storm and the rushing stream had each their lesson, as well as the gentler harmonies of cloudless sky and tranquil water. But his warmest, his absorbing love, was for the brethren who were engaged with himself in the same battle against the weakness and corruption of the flesh, in the same race for an incorruptible crown. To him his friend was as the seal upon his heart. Not less than his words, his silence was expressive of a love which could not be weakened or forgotten. He had no need to forget or to mourn. Death could not part them in the communion of the living and the dead. Their prayers still rose together before the Divine throne; and he could ask the intercession of the brethren for the soul of his friend as though he asked it for his own. Here on earth he had his 'happy home' (beau lieu, joyeux lieu), his 'haven of rest' (bon repos), his valley of peace,' from which he was one day to migrate to a haven which no storms may vex, and a valley where no griefs may enter.

It is an exquisite picture, and one, we doubt not, realised in its general outlines far more frequently than the tone of modern thought may be disposed to admit. Unfortunately, there is scarcely a single feature in this description which does not involve some ambiguity or equivocation of language, or which does not receive its contradiction, even in the most heroic and the most devoted of those whom M. de Montalembert delights to honour as the Chivalry of God.

The truth is, that, as theological controversies are indefinitely lengthened when both parties insist on employing the same word in different senses, so here the examination of monachism can serve no real purpose, as long as we permit certain abstract words to be used on either side without a precise definition. Liberty and faith, charity and religion, prayer and virginity, are terms which may certainly bear more senses than one; and the tacit limitation to one meaning virtually decides the whole question. They are also terms which are special favourites with the greatest monastic writers; and if, when employed by them, they sometimes express what is absolutely false, more frequently they have a meaning which is partially true. In other words, monachism, whether in the East or West, is no compact and harmonious whole. In every stage of its course, except perhaps the earliest, it exhibits the working of conflicting and irreconcileable ideas. It has its repulsive and attractive phases; but, as in the architecture of Teutonic Christendom, its grandest developements are found in the periods of transition. Yet under the greatest outward contrasts there is a close and

inseparable connexion between all the forms through which it has passed. One common characteristic binds together the learned Benedictine and the savage hermit who gloried in his ignorance. One feature at least there is in common between Clugny and Citeaux in the days of their glory and the anchorites who peopled the deserts of the Thebais. In this one common feature is to be found, as we believe, the essence of monachism: but it is a bond which immediately connects the highest form of that life with the earliest and the most remote philosophy of the East.

This unbroken connexion M. de Montalembert has very clearly perceived. To him, as to almost every one else, the great type of the medieval monk is St. Bernard. In him is to be found the sternest asceticism, the warmest affection, the deepest humility united with the mightiest power and the most imperious authority. But, in the power and the majesty of St. Bernard, we see simply the result of the great battle which had been fought and won by Hildebrand and Peter Damiani, while these, in their turn, were but disciples of the first Gregory, and he of Benedict. But between Benedict and Bernard there was little superficial resemblance. Between Benedict and Antony, with the swarms who after him overran the Egyptian solitudes, there is, at least in the early portion of his history, almost an identity. And again, between the Christian monks of Nitria and the Therapeute of the older faith, the Essenes of Judea, and the monks who held the creed of Zoroaster and of Bouddha, there is the same absolute and essential harmony. Undoubtedly on these earliest Egyptian anchorites Christianity had impressed something of its own character-had imparted some ideas not known to the earlier systems. But the outward results were the same: the spiritual condition, so far as we may judge of it, not very different.

The admission of this connexion by M. de Montalembert, even if it be not held to prove that Christian and Buddhistic monachism is one and the same system and grounded on the same philosophy, must at the least prove that the strict type, and consequently the most legitimate form, of monasticism is not that of the monk in the stately Benedictine or Cistercian convent, but of the solitary anchorite in his inaccessible cell. And, accordingly, true to the real monastic instinct, M. de Montalembert has as keen an admiration, if not a more fervent tribute, for the hermit who chained himself to a rock, or stood upright for months and years, as for the greatest scholars and theologians who adorned the monasteries of the middle ages.

Either, then, Christian monachism is one and the same with