better than dogs or cattle. The mother is heartbroken. Not one of
her children can ordinarily rise from their abject position; they can
live and breathe the common air, and that is all. They are unmolested
in their mud huts, if they will toil for the owner of their village at
the foot of the baronial castle. But one of her sons is bright and
religious. He attracts the attention of a sympathetic monk, whose
venerable retreat is shaded with trees, adorned with flowers, and seated
perhaps on the side of a murmuring stream, whose banks have been made
fertile by industry and beautiful with herds of cattle and flocks of
sheep. He urges the afflicted mother to consecrate him to the service of
the Church; and the boy enters the sanctuary and is educated according
to the fashion of the age, growing up a sad, melancholy, austere, and
pharisaical member of the fraternity, whose spirit is buried in a gloomy
grave of ascetic severities, He passes from office to office. In time he
becomes the prior of his convent,--possibly its abbot, the equal of that
proud baron in whose service his father lost his life, the controller of
innumerable acres, the minister of kings. How, outside the Church, could
he thus have arisen? But in the monastery he is enabled, in the most
aristocratic age of the world, to rise to the highest of worldly
dignities. And he is a man of peace and not of war. He hates war; he
seeks to quell dissensions and quarrels. He believes that there is a
higher than the warrior's excellence. Monachism recognized what
feudalism did not,--the claims of man as man. In this respect it was
human and sympathetic. It furnished a retreat from misery and
oppression. It favored contemplative habits and the passive virtues, so
much needed in turbulent times. Whatever faults the monks had, it must
be allowed that they alleviated sufferings, and presented the only
consolation that their gloomy and iron age afforded. In an imperfect
manner their convents answered the purpose of our modern hotels,
hospitals, and schools. It was benevolence, charity, and piety which the
monks aimed to secure, and which they often succeeded in diffusing among
people more wretched and ignorant than themselves.

AUTHORITIES.

Saint Bernard's Works, especially the Epistles; Mabillon; Helyot's
Histoire des Ordres Monastiques; Dugdale's Monasticon; Doering's
Geschichte der Monchsorden; Montalembert's Les Moines d'Occident;
Milman's Latin Christianity; Morison's L