rm of superstition with
which human nature has insulted heaven and disgraced itself.

Leaving, however, for the present, the meaning of monastic asceticism,
it seems necessary to insist that there really was such a thing; there
is no doubt about it. If the particular actions told of each saint are
not literally true, as belonging to him, abundance of men did for many
centuries lead the sort of life which saints are said to have led. We
have got a notion that the friars were a snug, comfortable set, after
all; and the life in a monastery pretty much like that in a modern
university, where the old monks' language and affectation of
unworldliness does somehow contrive to co-exist with as large a mass of
bodily enjoyment as man's nature can well appropriate. Very likely this
was the state into which many of the monasteries had fallen in the
fifteenth century. It was a symptom of a very rapid disorder which had
set in among them, and which promptly terminated in dissolution. But
long, long ages lay behind the fifteenth century, in which, wisely or
foolishly, these old monks and hermits did make themselves a very hard
life of it; and the legend only exceeded the reality in being a very
slightly idealised portrait. We are not speaking of the miracles; that
is a wholly different question. When men knew little of the order of
nature, whatever came to pass without an obvious cause was at once set
down to influences beyond nature and above it; and so long as there were
witches and enchanters, strong with the help of the bad powers, of
course the especial servants of God would not be left without graces to
outmatch and overcome the devil. And there were many other reasons why
the saints should work miracles. They had done so under the old
dispensation, and there was no obvious reason why Christians should be
worse off than Jews. And again, although it be true, in the modern
phrase, which is beginning to savour a little of cant, that the highest
natural is the highest supernatural, nevertheless natural facts permit
us to be so easily familiar with them, that they have an air of
commonness; and when we have a vast idea to express, there is always a
disposition to the extraordinary. But the miracles are not the chief
thing; nor ever were they so. Men did not become saints by working
miracles, but they worked miracles because they had become saints; and
the instructiveness and value of their lives lay in the means which they
had used t