[CHAPTER I.]
THE CONVENT AS AN ABSTRACT IDEA.
This book is a drama in which the hero is the Infinite. The second character is Man.
Under these circumstances, as a convent happens to lie on our road, we ought to enter it. Why? Because the convent, which belongs as much to the East as to the West, to antiquity as to modern times, to Paganism, to Buddhism, to Mahometanism, as to Christianity, is one of the lenses which man brings to bear on the Infinite.
This is no place to develop unrestrictedly certain ideas; still, while we maintain absolutely our reservations, our restrictions, and even our indignation, we ought to acknowledge, that whenever we find in man the sense of the Infinite, well or ill conceived, we are seized with a feeling of respect. In the synagogue, in the mosque, in the pagoda, in the wigwam, there is a repulsive side which we detest, and a sublime side which we reverence. What a subject for meditation for the spirit, and what a boundless revery is the reverberation of God on the human wall!
[CHAPTER II.]
THE CONVENT AS AN HISTORICAL FACT.
From the point of view of history, of reason, and of truth, monastic life must be condemned.
Monasteries when they abound in a nation are tourniquets applied to circulation, oppressive fixtures, centres of idleness where centres of activity are needed. Monastic communities bear the same relation to the great community of society that the mistletoe does to the oak, or the wart to the human body. Their prosperity and their plumpness are the impoverishment of the country. The rule of the monastery, salutary at the beginning of civilizations, useful in bringing about the subjugation of brutality by the spiritual, is harmful in the ripe strength of a nation. Further, when it relaxes and when it enters into its period of decadence, as it still sets the example, it becomes harmful by the very reasons which made it healthful in its time of purity.