t of
chivalry; and Patrick on the mountain or Antony in
the desert are equal models of patient austerity. The
knights fight with giants, enchanters, robbers, unknightly
nobles, or furious wild beasts; the Christians fight with
the world, the flesh, and the devil. The knight leaves
the comforts of home in quest of adventures, the saint
in quest of penance, and on the bare rocks or in
desolate wildernesses subdues the devil in his flesh with
prayers and sufferings, and so alien is it all to the whole
thought and system of the modern Christian, that he
either rejects such stories altogether as monks' impostures,
or receives them with disdainful wonder, as one
more shameful form of superstition with which human
nature has insulted heaven and disgraced itself.

Leaving, however, for the present, the meaning of
monastic asceticism, it seems necessary to insist that
there really was such a thing; there is no doubt about
it. If the particular actions told of each saint are not
literally true, as belonging to him, abundance of men
did for many centuries lead the sort of life which they
are said to have led. We have got a notion that the
friars were a snug, comfortable set, after all; and the
life in a monastery pretty much like that in a modern
university, where the old monks' language and affectation
of unworldliness does somehow contrive to co-exist
with as large a mass of bodily enjoyment as man's
nature can well appropriate; and very likely this was
the state into which many of the monasteries had fallen
in the fifteenth century. It had begun to be, and it
was a symptom of a very rapid disorder in them,
promptly terminating in dissolution; but long, long ages
lay behind the fifteenth century, in which wisely or
foolishly these old monks and hermits did make themselves
a very hard life of it; and the legend only exceeded
the reality, in being a very slightly idealized
portrait of it. We are not speaking of the miracles; that
is a wholly different question. When men knew little
of the order of nature, whatever came to pass without
an obvious cause was at once set down to influences
beyond nature and above it; and so long as there were
witches and enchanters, strong with the help of the bad
powers, of course the especial servants of God would
not be left without graces to outmatch and overcome
the devil. And there were many other reasons why the
saints should work miracles. They had done so under
the old dispensation,