s a natural love of
solitude, which became almost irresistible when reinforced by a despair
of the world's redemption. The poet voiced the feelings of almost every
soul, at some period in life, when he wrote:

"O for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumor of oppression or deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never reach me more."

The longing for solitude accompanied the desire for salvation. An
unconquerable weariness of the world, with its strife and passion,
overcame the seeker after God. A yearning to escape the duties of social
life, which were believed to interfere with one's duty to God, possessed
his soul. The flight from the world was merely the method adopted to
satisfy his soul-longings. If such times of degeneracy and rampant
iniquity ever return, if humanity is again compelled to stagger under
the moral burdens that crushed the Roman Empire, without doubt the love
of solitude, which is now held in check by the satisfactions of a
comparatively pure and peaceful social life, will again arise in its
old-time strength and impel men to seek in waste and lonely places the
virtues they cannot acquire in a decaying civilization.

Even amid the delights of human fellowship, and surrounded by so much
that ministers to restfulness of soul, it is often hard to repress a
longing to shatter the fetters of custom, to flee from the noise and
confusion of this hurrying, fretful world, and to pass one's days in a
coveted retirement, far from the maddening strife and tumult.
Montalembert's profound appreciation of monastic life was never more
aptly illustrated than in the following declaration: "In the depths of
human nature there exists without doubt, a tendency instinctive, though
confused and evanescent, toward retirement and solitude. What man,
unless completely depraved by vice or weighed down by care and cupidity,
has not experienced once, at least, before his death, the attraction of
solitude?"

While the motives just described were unquestionably preeminent among
the causative factors in monasticism, it should not be taken for granted
that there were no others, or that either or both of these motives
controlled every monk. The personal considerations tending to keep up
the flight from the world were numerous and active. It would be a
mistake to credit all the monks, and at some periods even a majority of
them, with pure and lofty purp