There is much that is out of joint, much to justify doleful prophecies, in the social and religious conditions of the present age, but the signs of the times are not all ominous. At all events, nothing would be gained by a return to the monkish ideals of the past. The hope of the world lies in the further development and completer realization of those great principles of human freedom that distinguish this century from the past. The history of monasticism clearly shows that the monasteries could not minister to that development of liberty, truth and justice, which constitute the indispensable condition of human happiness and human progress. Unable to adjust themselves to the new age, unwilling to welcome the new light, rejecting the doctrine of individual freedom, the monks were forced to retire from the field.
So fell in England that institution which, for twelve centuries, had exercised marvelous dominion over the spiritual and temporal interests of the continent, and for eight hundred years had suffered or thrived on English soil. "The day came, and that a drear winter day, when its last mass was sung, its last censer waved, its last congregation bent in rapt and lovely adoration before the altar." Its majestic and solemn ruins proclaim its departed grandeur. Its deeds of mercy, its conflicts with kings and bishops, its prayers and chants and penances, its virtues and its vices, its trials and its victories, its wealth and its poverty, all are gone. Silence and death keep united watch over cloister and tomb. We should be ungrateful if we forgot its blessings; we should be untrue if, ignoring its evils, we sought to bring back to life that which God has laid in the sepulcher of the dead.
"Where pleasant was the spot for men to dwell,
Amid its fair broad lands the abbey lay,
Sheltering dark orgies that were shame to tell,
And cowled and barefoot beggars swarmed the way,
All in their convent weeds of black, and white, and gray.
From many a proud monastic pile, o'erthrown,
Fear-struck, the brooded inmates rushed and fled;
The web, that for a thousand years had grown
O'er prostrate Europe, in that day of dread
Crumbled and fell, as fire dissolves the flaxen thread."
--Bryant.
VIII
CAUSES AND IDEALS OF MONASTICISM
All forms of religious character and conduct are grounded in certain cravings of the soul, which, in seeking satisfaction, are influenced by theoretical opinions. The longings of the human heart constitute the impulse, or the energy, of religion. The intellectual convictions act as guiding forces. As a religious type, therefore, the monk was produced by the action of certain desires, influenced by specific opinions respecting God, the soul, the body, the world and their relations.
The existence of monasticism in non-Christian religions implies that whatever impetus the ascetic impulses in human nature received from Christian teaching, there is some broader basis for monastic life than the tenets of any creed. Biblical history and Christian theology furnish some explanation of the rise of Christian monasticism, but they do not account for the monks of ancient India. The teachings of Jesus exerted a profound influence upon the Christian monks, but they cannot explain the Oriental asceticism that flourished before the Christ of the New Testament was born. There must have been some motive, or motives, operating on human nature as such, a knowledge of which will help to account for the monks of Indian antiquity as well as the begging friars of modern times. It will therefore be in order to begin the present inquiry by seeking those causes which gave rise to monasticism in general.