But while acknowledging the great services which the monks liave rendered to the world in the medi;cval period, there is another view of the case to which we cannot close our eyes. Monasticism, instead of being "one of the greatest institutions of Christianitj'," has no claim whatever to be divine in its origin ; Christ and his apostles were not monks, neither did they enjoin upon their followers to renounce the society of their kind, and immure themselves in the solitude of a clois- ter. On the contrary, tlie leaven was to be put into the meal ; tlie true religion was to come in contact with humanity, and strive to gain, to direct, to improve it. Asceticism is a mere human attempt to perform upon human nature a work wliich tlie Gospel has made am- 1 pie provision for performing in a more effective way. "Monasticism," saj-s Schaff, "withdrew from society many useful forces; diffused an indifference for the family life, the civil and military service of the state, j and all public practical operations; turned the chan- nels of religion from the world into the desert, and so hastened the decline of Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and the whole Roman empire. It nourished religious fa- naticism, often raised storms of popular agitation, and , rushed passionately into the controversies of theolog- j ical parties; generally, it is true, on the side of ortho- dox)', but often, as at the Kphesian 'council of rob- \ bers,' in favor of heresy, and especially in behalf of the ' crudest superstition. Tor the simple, divine way of salvation in the Gospel, it substituted an arbitrarv, eccentric, ostentatious, and pretentious sanctit3\ It darkened the all-sufficient merits of Christ by the glit- ter of the ovcr-nioritorious works of man. It measured virtue Uy the quantity of outward exercises instead of ! the quality of the inward disposition, and disseminated ' self-righteousness and an anxious, legal, and mechan- I
] ical religion. Monasticism, indeed, lowered the stand- , ard of general morality in proportion as it set itself above it, and claimed a corresponding higher merit; and it exerted in general a demoralizing influence on , the people, who came to consider themselves the pro- \fanum vulr/us mundi, and to live accordingly" (comp. Xeander, ii, 255-257). Grant that the cloister has often j sheltered the helpless and unfortunate ; it has often I sheltered, too, the ignorant, the superstitious, the crim- j inal, the polluted, the despot, the knave. Brigands j have been known to use abbeys as the storehouse of ; their plunder, and kings have used their rich revenues for pensioning their mistresses, supporting their bas- tards, and rewarding the most unscrupulous of their tools. The education received in the cloisters was es- sentially of a narrow kind, dwarfing the intellect, and robbing it of that expansiveness and freedom essential to high culture and to real progress. If they opened their door to the feeble and innocent in days of onpres- j sion and danger, it cannot be i)retended that tliere is the same need for them now, when law and order are established, when society provides ample means for alleviating every want and woe that it is possible to relieve, when the printing-press has given a perpetuity to literature which neither Goth nor Vandal can de- stroj', and when the claims of the poor and the defence- less meet with favorable consideration from every gov- ernment in Christendom.
It is not, however, monasticism, as such, which has proved a blessing to the Church and the world ; for the monasticism of India, which for three thousand years has pushed the practice of mortilication to all the ex- cesses of delirium, never saved a single soul, nor pro- duced a single benefit to the race. It was Christianity in monasticism which has done all the good, and used this abnormal mode of life as a means for carrying for- ward its mission of love and peace. In proportion as monasticism was animated and controlled by the spirit of Christianity, it proved a blessing; while separated from it, it degenerated and became a fruitful source of evil. Monasticism, moreover, seems even to have lost its power of propagating Christianity in any type; there is no instance since the Reformation of an)' pa- gan nation being Christianized by monks. Indeed we cannot concede that it should be the aim of the Christian missionary to create a well-organized society under the dictation of one great ecclesiastical rule, such as monasticism, if it labored at all, would make its object and end. We indignanth' repudiate the posi- tion that, in order to teach men to become Christians, to recommend the law of Christ, convert the untu- tored savage, stem the fierce passions of a pagan world, recreate the springs of national and social life, any such methods were necessary, or even peculiar!}' adapted to the purpose, as monasticism enii>l(iy<il in its missionary work. The Western monks accepted, as the Eastern monks had done before them, an anti- social theory which strikes at the very heart of the providence of God, and which sprang first of all, and springs still, from a dualistic scepticism of the love of the supreme Father, from a jaundiced estimate of the world, from a grievous misUike as to the seat of evil and the .nature of sin. They ennobled the theory; thej' consecrated it to higher issues than any of which paganism ever dreamed ; they hallowed it as they hal- lowed other things, hiding its evil root with the influ- ence of their virtues, but they did not change the char- acter of the root. It always had led to spiritual pride, and fostered the very propensities it professed to hold in abe^'ance. True, it provided for ages an asylum for broken hearts; it stood in its corporate capacity and strength between forces of the state ; it furnished op- portunities for great intellectual and artistic feats; it (juickened and subtilized the faculties of men to en- counter the diflicult problems of jiure thought, and fur- nished various agencies of a civilizing character ; liut it contained within itself the seeds of its own dissolution.