itude Upon the Individual_.

It has already been shown that some solitude is essential to our richest
culture. Our higher nature demands time for reflection and meditation.
But the monks carried this principle to an extreme, and they
overestimated its benefits. "Ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and
inordinate desires," says Montaigne, "do not leave us because we forsake
our native country, they often follow us even to cloisters and
philosophical schools; nor deserts, nor caves, nor hair shirts, nor
fasts, can disengage us from them."

Besides these passions, which the monks carried with them, their
solitary life tended to foster spiritual pride, contract sympathy, and
engender an inhumane spirit. True, there were exceptions; but the
sublime characters which survive in monastic history are by no means
typical of its usual effects. Seclusion did not benefit the average
monk. Indeed there is something wanting in even the loftiest monastic
characters. "The heroes of monasticism," says Allen, "are not the heroes
of modern life. All put together, they would not furnish out one such
soul as William of Orange, or Gustavus, or Milton. Independence of
thought and liberty of conscience, they renounced once for all, in
taking upon them the monastic vow. All the larger enterprises, all the
broad humanities, which to our mind make a greater career, were rigidly
shut off by a barrier that could not be crossed. All the warmth and
wealth of social and domestic life was a field of forbidden fruit, to be
entered only through the gate of unpardonable sin."

Thus self-excluded from a normal life in society, often the subject of
self-inflicted pain, it is no wonder that the monk impaired all the
nobler and manlier feelings of the soul, that he became strangely
indifferent to human affection, that bigotry and pride often sat as
joint rulers on the throne of his heart. He who had trampled on all
filial relations would scarcely recognize the bonds of human
brotherhood. He who heard not the prayer of his own mother would not be
likely to listen to the cry of the tortured heretic for mercy. Man as
man was not reverenced. It was the monk in man who was esteemed. As
Milman puts it, "Bigotry has always found its readiest and sternest
executioners among those who have never known the charities of life."

Nor is it a matter of surprise that the monk was spiritually proud. He
was supposed to stand in the inner circle, a little nearer the thron