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cause which brought the weak into the monasteries, brought the strong,
many of the very strongest.

The middle-age records give us a long list of kings, princes, nobles, who
having done (as they held) their work in the world outside, went into
those convents to try their hands at what seemed to them (and often was)
better work than the perpetual coil of war, intrigue, and ambition, which
was not the crime, but the necessary fate, of a ruler in the middle ages.
Tired of work, and tired of life; tired too, of vain luxury and vain
wealth, they fled to the convent, as to the only place where a man could
get a little peace, and think of God, and his own soul; and recollected,
as they worked with their own hands by the side of the lowest-born of
their subjects, that they had a human flesh and blood, a human immortal
soul, like those whom they had ruled. Thank God that the great have
other methods now of learning that great truth; that the work of life, if
but well done, will teach it to them: but those were hard times, and wild
times; and fighting men could hardly learn, save in the convent, that
there was a God above who watched the widows' and the orphans' tears, and
when he made inquisition for blood, forgot not the cause of the poor.

Such men and women of rank brought into the convent, meanwhile, all the
prestige of their rank, all their superior knowledge of the world; and
became the patrons and protectors of the society; while they submitted,
generally with peculiar humility and devotion, to its most severe and
degrading rules. Their higher sensibilities, instead of making them
shrink from hardship, made them strong to endure self-sacrifices, and
often self-tortures, which seem to us all but incredible; and the lives,
or rather living deaths, of the noble and princely penitents of the early
middle age, are among the most beautiful tragedies of humanity.

To these monasteries, too, came the men of the very highest intellect, of
whatsoever class. I say, of the very highest intellect. Tolerably
talented men might find it worth while to stay in the world, and use
their wits in struggling upward there. The most talented of all would be
the very men to see a better 'carriere ouverte aux talens' than the world
could give; to long for deeper and loftier meditation than could be found
in the court; for a more divine life, a more blessed death, than could be
found in the camp and the battle-field.

And so it befals, t