us fraternities--companies of men who desired to
devote themselves to goodness--to give up pleasure, and amusement, and
self-indulgence, and to spend their lives in prayer and works of
charity.

These houses became centres of pious beneficence. The monks, as the
brotherhoods were called, were organised in different orders, with some
variety of rule, but the broad principle was the same in all. They were
to live for others, not for themselves. They took vows of poverty, that
they might not be entangled in the pursuit of money. They took vows of
chastity, that the care of a family might not distract them from the
work which they had undertaken. Their efforts of charity were not
limited to this world. Their days were spent in hard bodily labour, in
study, or in visiting the sick. At night they were on the stone-floors
of their chapels, holding up their withered hands to heaven, interceding
for the poor souls who were suffering in purgatory.

The world, as it always will, paid honour to exceptional excellence. The
system spread to the furthest limits of Christendom. The religious
houses became places of refuge, where men of noble birth, kings and
queens and emperors, warriors and statesmen, retired to lay down their
splendid cares, and end their days in peace. Those with whom the world
had dealt hardly, or those whom it had surfeited with its unsatisfying
pleasures, those who were disappointed with earth, and those who were
filled with passionate aspirations after heaven, alike found a haven of
rest in the quiet cloister. And, gradually, lands came to them, and
wealth, and social dignity--all gratefully extended to men who deserved
so well of their fellows; while no landlords were more popular than
they, for the sanctity of the monks sheltered their dependents as well
as themselves.

Travel now through Ireland, and you will see in the wildest parts of it
innumerable remains of religious houses, which had grown up among a
people who acknowledged no rule among themselves except the sword, and
where every chief made war upon his neighbour as the humour seized him.
The monks among the O's and the Mac's were as defenceless as sheep among
the wolves; but the wolves spared them for their character. In such a
country as Ireland then was, the monasteries could not have survived for
a generation but for the enchanted atmosphere which surrounded them.

Of authority, the religious orders were practically independent. They
were amen