el comes there
to join in its services." And then he goes on to
describe his "dear cell," and the holy happy hours
which he had spent there, "with the wind whistling
through the loose stones, and the sea spray hanging on
his hair." Aran is no better than a wild rock. It is
strewed over with the ruins which may still be seen of
the old hermitages; and at their best they could have
been but such places as sheep would huddle under in
a storm, and shiver in the cold and wet which would
pierce through to them.

Or, if written evidence be too untrustworthy, there
are silent witnesses which cannot lie, that tell the same
touching story. Whoever loiters among the ruins of a
monastery will see, commonly leading out of the cloisters,
rows of cellars half under-ground, low, damp, and
wretched-looking; an earthen floor, bearing no trace of
pavement; a roof from which the mortar and the damp
keep up (and always must have kept up) a perpetual
ooze: for a window a narrow slip in the wall, through
which the cold and the wind find as free an access as
the light. Such as they are, a well-kept dog would
object to accept a night's lodging in them; and if they
had been prison cells, thousands of philanthropic tongues
would have trumpeted out their horrors. The stranger
perhaps supposes that they were the very dungeons of
which he has heard such terrible things. He asks his
guide, and his guide tells him they were the monks'
dormitories. Yes; there on that wet soil, with that
dripping roof above them, was the self-chosen home of
those poor men. Through winter frost, through rain
and storm, through summer sunshine, generation after
generation of them, there they lived and prayed, and at
last lay down and died.

It is all gone now--gone as if it had never been; and
it was as foolish as, if the attempt had succeeded, it
would have been mischievous, to revive a devotional
interest in the Lives of the Saints. It would have
produced but one more unreality in an age already too full
of such. No one supposes we should have set to work
to live as they lived; that any man, however earnest in
his religion, would have gone looking for earth floors
and wet dungeons, or wild islands to live in, when he
could get anything better. Either we are wiser, or more
humane, or more self-indulgent; at any rate we are
something which divides us from mediaeval Christianity by an
impassable gulf which this age or this epoch will not see
bridged over. Never