Among the principal elements of the ancient Monachism, it is natural to name, first—

Its contempt of the divine constitution of human nature, and the outrage it offered to the most salutary instincts.

It may be difficult to determine which is the greater folly and impiety, that of the Atheist, who can contemplate the admirable mechanism of the body, and not see there the proofs of divine wisdom and benevolence; or that of the Enthusiast, who, seeing and acknowledging the hand of God in the mechanism of the human frame, yet dares to institute, and to recommend, modes of life which do violence to the manifest intentions of the Creator, as therein displayed; and, moreover, is not afraid to assert a warrant from Heaven for such outrages; as if the Creator and Governor of the world were not one and the same Being;—one in counsel and purpose: or as if the Author of Christianity were at variance with the Author of nature! Yet this preposterous error, this virtual ManichÆism, has seemed to belong naturally to every attempt to stretch and exaggerate the precepts of the Gospel beyond their obvious sense; and indeed has seldom failed to show itself in seasons of unusual religious excitement.

Christianity is a religion neither for angels nor for ghosts; but for man, as God made him. Nevertheless, in revealing an endless existence, and in establishing the paramount claims of the future world, it has placed every interest of the present transient life under a comparison of immense disparity; so that it is true—true to a demonstration, that a man ought to "hate his own life" if the love of it puts his welfare for immortality in jeopardy. Unquestionably, if by such means the well-being of the imperishable spirit could be secured and promoted, it would highly become a wise man to pass the residue of life, though it should hold out half a century, upon the summit of a column, exposed, like a bronze, to the alternations of day and night, of summer and winter; or to stand speechless and fixed, with the arms extended, until the joints should stiffen, and the tongue forget its office; or to inhabit a tomb, or to hang suspended in the air by a hook in the side: these, and if there be any other practices still more horrifying to humanity, were doubtless wise, if, in the use of them, the soul might be advantaged; for the soul is of infinitely greater value than the body.

And much more might it be deemed lawful and commendable to refrain from matrimony, to withdraw from human society, to be clad in sackcloth, to inhabit a cavern, if such comparatively moderate abstinences and mortifications were found to promote virtue, and so to ensure an enhancement of the bliss that never ends. Conduct of this sort, however painful it may be, is perfectly in harmony with the principle universally admitted to be reasonable, and in fact very commonly reduced to practice, namely, to endure a smaller immediate loss or inconvenience, for the sake of securing greater future good.

The dictates of self-interest every day prompt sacrifices of this kind; and the maxims of natural virtue go much further, and often require a man to make the greatest deposit possible, even when the future advantage is doubtful, and when it is not the sufferer who is to reap the expected benefit! On this principle the soldier places himself at the cannon's mouth, because the safety or future welfare of his country can be purchased at no other price. On this principle a pious son denies the wishes of his heart, and remains unmarried, that he may sustain a helpless parent. Christianity is not therefore at all peculiar in asserting the claims of higher, over lower reasons of conduct, in peculiar circumstances, or in demanding that, on special occasions, the enjoyments of life, and life itself, should be held cheap, or abandoned.

Our Lord and his ministers explicitly enjoined such sacrifices, whenever the interests of the present and of the future life came in competition: and themselves set the example of the self-denial which they recommended. Nothing can be more clear than the rule of bodily sacrifice maintained and exemplified in the New Testament; and this rule is in perfect accordance with the dictates of good sense, and with the common practice of mankind. Fasting, celibacy, martyrdom, and such like contrarieties to the "will of the flesh," stand all on the same ground in the system of Christian morals: they are ills which a wise and pious man will cheerfully endure whenever he is so placed that they cannot be avoided without damage or hazard to the soul, or to the souls of others. But when no such alternative is presented, then the voluntary infliction becomes, as well in religious as in secular affairs, a folly, an impiety, and often a crime. To die without necessity, or to inflict one's self without reason, is not only an absurdity; but a sin.

And how immensely is this folly and immorality aggravated, when it is found that the voluntary suffering, instead of being simply useless, becomes, in its consequences, highly pernicious; and when, by abundant evidence, it is proved to generate the very worst corruptions and perversions to which human nature is liable! Such, clearly, are the inflictions of the monastic life—the solitude, the abstinence, the celibacy, the poverty!

The rule of Christian martyrdom is precise and unequivocal, and is such as absolutely to exclude every sort of spontaneous heroism. The motive also by which the Christian should be sustained, is of a heart-affecting, not of an exciting kind; and the style of the apostles when alluding to this subject, is singularly sedate and reserved; nor is an idea introduced of a kind to inflame fanatical ambition. The reason of this caution is obvious; for to have kindled the enthusiasm of martyrdom would have been to nullify the demonstration intended to be given to the world of the truth of Christianity. So long as martyrdom rested on the primitive basis (and it rested there, with few exceptions, until miraculous attestations had ceased to be afforded,) it yielded conclusive proof of the reality of the facts affirmed by the confessors. That is to say, so long as Christians suffered only when suffering could be avoided in no other way than by denying their profession; and so long as they endured tortures, and met death, in a spirit not raised above a calm courage; or even displayed timidity or reluctance, such sufferings afforded direct demonstration of the sincerity of their belief; and they, having been eye-witnesses of supernatural interpositions, and being often the very agents of miraculous power, their sincere belief, and their honesty, carried with it the proof of the facts so attested.

But when, at a later time, martyrdom was courted in a spirit of false heroism, and came to be endured in a corresponding style of enthusiastic excitement, it lost almost the whole of its value as a proof of the truth of Christianity. For it is well known to be within the compass of human nature to endure, unmoved and exultingly, the most extreme torments in fanatical adherence to a religious tenet: but such sufferings evince nothing more than the firmness or the infatuation of the victim. On the contrary, when the confessor has fallen into the hands of persecuting power by no imprudence or temerity of his own, and when he avails himself, with promptitude and calmness, of every legal and honorable means of self-defence or escape, and when he pleads truth and right in arrest of judgment, and at last yields to the stroke because nothing could avert it but the forfeiture of conscience, then it is manifest that a deliberate conviction is the real motive of his conduct: and then also, if he have had a personal knowledge of the facts, for affirming which he dies, his death, on the surest principles of evidence, must be accepted as containing incontestible proof of those facts.

The recluses were not the first to spoil the primitive practice of martyrdom; but their principles greatly cherished the abuse when once it had been introduced; and still more did their conduct and their writings enhance the pernicious superstitions which presently afterwards resulted from the foolish respect paid to the tombs and relics of confessors. These trivial and idolatrous reverences of human heroism can find no room of entrance until the great realities of Christianity have been forgotten; and until the humbling and peace-giving doctrine of atonement has been lost sight of. The contrite heart, made glad by the assurance of pardon through the merit of him who alone has merit supererogatory, neither admits sentiments of vain glory for itself, nor is prone to yield excessive worship to the deeds of others.

It deserves particular notice that the martyrs of the Reformation in England, France, Spain, and Italy, with very few exceptions, suffered in a spirit incomparably more sedate, and more nearly allied to that displayed and recommended by the apostles, than did the Christians, generally, of the third century. The reason of the difference is not obscure; these modern confessors understood the capital doctrine of Christianity much more fully and clearly than did those of the age of Origen.

Celibacy, though it may seem to be a kind of self-devotion less extreme than voluntary martyrdom, was in fact a much greater, and a much worse outrage upon human nature. This fundamental article of the monkish system had evidently two distinct motives: the first, and probably the originating cause of so extraordinary a practice, was the impracticability of uniting the pleasures of seclusion and of lazy meditation, with the duties and burdens of domestic life. The alternative was unavoidable, either to renounce the happiness and the cares of husband and father, or the spiritual luxuries of supine contemplation. The one species of enjoyment offered itself precisely as the price that must be paid for obtaining the other.[6] The second motive of monkish celibacy, and which so gained ascendency over the first as to keep it almost wholly out of sight, sprung more immediately from the centre illusion of the system; and the real nature of that illusion stands forward in this instance in a distinct and tangible form. The very germ of that transmuted piety, which, in the end, banished true religion from the church, may readily be brought under inspection by tracing the natural history of the sentiment that attributes sanctity to single life.

For reasons that are obvious and highly important, a sentiment of pudicity, which can never be thrown aside without reducing man to the level—nay, below the level of the brutes, belongs to the primary link of the social system. But this feeling, necessary as it is to the purity and the dignity of social life, suggests, by a close and easy affinity of ideas, the supposition of guilt as belonging to indulgence; and then the correlative supposition of innocence, or of holiness, as belonging to continence. Nevertheless, feelings of this sort, when analyzed, will be found to have their seat in the imagination exclusively, and only by accident to implicate the moral sense. They belong to that class of natural illusions, which, in the combination of the various and discordant ingredients of human nature, serve to amalgamate what would otherwise be utterly incompatible. Among all the natural illusions, or, as they might be termed, the pseudo-moral sentiments, there is not one which so nearly resembles the genuine sense of right and wrong as this, or one that is so intimately blended with them.

It is easy then to perceive the process by which infirm minds passed into the error of attributing sanctity to celibacy. But the law of Christian purity knows of no such confusion of ideas. The very same authority which forbids adultery, enjoins marriage; and so long as morality is understood to consist in obedience to the declared will of God, it can never be imagined that a man is defiled by living in matrimony, any more than by "eating with unwashen hands." But when once religion has passed into the imagination, and when the sentiments which have their seat in that faculty have become predominant, so as to crush or enfeeble those that belong to conscience, then is it inevitable that the true purity which consists in "keeping the commandments," should be supplanted by that artificial holiness which is a mere refinement upon natural instincts. Under the influence of false notions of this sort, nothing seems so saintly as for a man to shrink horrifically from the touch of woman; nothing scarcely so spiritually degrading as to be a husband and a father.[7] Impious and mad enthusiasm! and not only irreligious and absurd, but pestilent also; for this same monkish doctrine of the merit of virginity stands convicted, on abundant evidence, of having transplanted the worst vices of polytheistic Greece into the very sanctuaries of religion; and so, of infecting the nations of modern Europe with crimes which, had they not been kept alive in monasteries, Christianity would long ago have banished from the earth.

How little did the pious men, who, in the third century, extolled the merit of mortification, and petty torture, and celibacy, think of the hideous corruptions in which these practices were to terminate! A sagacity more than human was needed to foresee the end from the beginning. But, with the experience of past ages before us, we may well learn to distrust every specious attempt to exaggerate morality, or to attach ideas of blame to things innocent or indifferent. This over-doing of virtue never fails to divert the mind from what is substantially good, and is moreover the almost invariable symptom of a transmuted or fictitious pietism.

II. The ancient monkery was a system of the most deliberate selfishness. That solicitude for the preservation of individual interests which forms the basis of the human constitution, is so broken up and counteracted by the claims and pleasures of domestic life, that, though the principle remains, its manifestations are suppressed, and its predominance effectually prevented, except in some few tempers peculiarly unsocial. But the anchoret is a selfist by his very profession; and, like the sensualist, though his taste is of another kind, he pursues his personal gratifications, reckless of the welfare of others. His own advantage or delight, or, to use his favorite phrase—"the good of his soul," is the sovereign object of his cares. His meditations, even if they embrace the compass of heaven, come round, ever and again, to find their ultimate issue in his own bosom; but can that be true wisdom which just ends at the point whence it started? True wisdom is a progressive principle. In abjuring the use of the active faculties, in reducing himself, by the spell of vows, to a condition of physical and moral annihilation, the insulated being says to his fellows, concerning whatever might otherwise have been converted to their benefit—"It is corban;" thus making void the law of love to our neighbor, by a pretended intensity of love to God.

That so monstrous an immorality should have dared to call itself by the name of sanctity, and should have done so too in front of Christianity, is indeed amazing; and could never have happened if Christianity had not first been shorn of its life-giving warmth, as the sun is deprived of its power of heat when we ascend into the rarity of upper space. The tendency of a taste for imaginative indulgences to petrify the heart has been already adverted to; and it receives a signal illustration in the monkish life; especially in its more perfect form of absolute separation from the society of man. The anchoret was a disjoined particle, frozen deep into the mass of his own selfishness, and there imbedded below the touch of every human sympathy. This sort of meditative insulation is the ultimate and natural issue of enthusiastic piety; and it may be met with even in our own times among those who have no inclination to run away from the comforts of common life.

III. Spiritual pride, the most repulsive of the religious vices, was both a main cause, and a principal effect of the ancient monachism.

The particular manner in which this odious pride sprung up in the monastery deserves attention. That sort of plain and practical religion which adapts itself to the circumstances of common life—the religion taught by the apostles, a religion of love, sobriety, temperance, justice, fit for the use of master and servant, of husband and wife, of parent and child, by no means satisfied the wishes of those who sought in Christianity a delicious dream of unearthly excitements. It was therefore indispensable to imagine a new style of religion; and hence arose the doctrine so warmly and incessantly advanced by the early favorers of monkery, that our Lord and his apostles taught a two-fold piety, and recognized an upper and an under class in the church, and sanctioned the division of the Christian body into what might be termed a plebeian, and a patrician order.

This doctrine appears more or less distinctly in every one of the fathers who at all favors the monastic life. It may seem to bear analogy to the principle of the Grecian philosophers who had their common maxims for the vulgar, and their hidden instructions for the few. But the resemblance is more apparent than real: the distinction arose among the Christians from altogether another source. The church, that is to say the collective body of true believers, is called in the New Testament the spouse of Christ; but the monks perverted the figure by using it distinctively, by calling individual Christians "the brides of Christ," and by appropriating the honor to those who had taken the vow of celibacy.

The most absurd and impious abuses of language presently followed from this error, and such as it were even blasphemous to repeat. Yet some of the greatest writers of the times are charmed with these irreligious conceits.

In accordance with this arrogant pretension, it was believed, that, while the Christian commonalty might be left to wallow in the affairs of common life—in business, matrimony, and such-like impurities—the "elect of Christ" stood on a platform, high lifted above the grossness of secular engagements and earthly passions, and were, in their Lord's esteem, immensely more holy, and higher in rank, as candidates for the honors of the future life, than the mass of the faithful. When this supposition became generally adopted and assented to, out of the monastery as well as within it, the first and natural consequence was a great depreciation of the standard of morals among the people. If there were admitted to be two rates or degrees of virtue, there must be, of course, two laws or rules of life: whatever therefore in the Scriptures seemed to be strict, or pure, or elevated, was assigned to the upper code; while the lower took to itself only what wore an aspect of laxity and indulgence. Even an attempt on the part of secular Christians to make advances in holiness might be condemned as a species of presumption, or as an invasion of the proprieties of the saintly order. Heavenly-mindedness and purity of heart were chartered to the regulars—the monopolists of perfect grace. Alas, that the privileged should have availed themselves so moderately of their rights!

A second, and not less natural consequence of the same principle, was the formation, among the monks, either of an insufferable arrogance and self-complacency, or of a villanous hypocrisy—an hypocrisy which qualified those who sustained it to become the agents of every detestable knavery that might promote the ambitious machinations, or screen the debaucheries of the order.

If a reputation for superior sanctity be ever safe and serviceable to a Christian, it must be when his conduct and temper, even to the inmost privacies of domestic life, are open to indifferent observers;—not to the cringing servitors of a religious establishment, or to the holy man's hangers-on and accomplices, but to the children and the servants of a family;—the moral vision of a child is especially quick and clear. He who thus lives under the eye of witnesses not to be deceived, and not to be bribed, may actually demean himself the better for being reputed eminently good. Not so the man who inhabits a den or a cell, who is seen by the world only through a loop-hole; or who shows himself to an admiring crowd when, and where, and in what posture he pleases. To such a one, the praise of sanctity will most often be found inscribed, on its other side, with a license to crime. Under circumstances so blasting to the simple honesty and unaffected humility of true piety, almost the best that charity can imagine is, that the hooded saint deludes himself, more even than he deceives others.

Such are the natural and almost invariable consequences—in monasteries, or out of them, of every ambitious attempt to render religion a something too elevated and too pure to be brought into contact with the affairs of common life. The mere endeavor generates a pretension that can never be filled out by truth and reality; and the deficiency must be made up by delusion and deception; the one begetting arrogance, the other knavery.

IV. Greediness of the supernatural formed an essential characteristic of the ancient monachism.

The cares, and toils, and necessities, the refreshments and delights of common life, are the great teachers of common sense; nor can there be any effective school of sober reason where these are excluded. Whoever, either by elevation of rank, or by peculiarity of habits, lives far removed from this kind of tuition, rarely makes much proficiency in that excellent quality of the intellect. A man who has little or nothing to do with other men on terms of open and free equality, needs the native sense of five, to behave himself only with a fair average of propriety. Absolute solitude (and seclusion in its degree) necessitates a lapse into some species of absurdity more or less nearly allied to insanity; and religious solitude naturally strays into the regions of vision and miracle.[8]

The monastery was at once the place where the illusions of distempered brains were the most likely to abound, and where the frauds which naturally follow in the train of such illusions could the most conveniently be hatched and executed. Those dungeons of dimness, of silence, of absolute obedience; those scenes of nocturnal ceremony; those labyrinths of subterrene communication; those nurseries of craft and credulity, seemed as if constructed for the very purpose of fabricating miracles; and, in fact, if all the narratives of supernatural occurrences that are found upon the pages of the ancient church-writers were numbered, incomparably the larger proportion would appear to have been connected immediately with the religious houses. The wonder which goes to swell the vaunted achievements of the sainted abbot or brother, was effected, we are assured—in the cell, in the chapel or church, in the convent-garden, in the depths of the overhanging forest, or upon the solitude of the neighboring shore! Of all such miracles it is enough to say, that whether genuine or not, they can claim no respect from posterity, seeing that they stand not within the circle of credible testimony. History—lover of simplicity—scorns to place them on her page in any other form than as evidences of the credulity, if not of the dishonesty of the times!

Many laborious and voluminous discussions might have been saved, if the simple and very reasonable rule had been adopted of waiving investigation into the credibility of any narrative of supernatural or pretended supernatural events, said to have taken place upon consecrated ground, or under sacred roofs. Fanes, caves, groves, churches, convents, cells, are places in which the lover of history will make but a transient stay: and he may easily find better employment than in sifting the evidence on which rest such stories as that of the roof-descended oil, used at the baptism of Clovis; or that of the relics discovered by Ambrose for the confutation of royal error, and a thousand others of like nature. Those who, reading church history cursorily, are perplexed by the frequency of suspicious miracle, are probably not aware, generally, how very large a proportion of all such annoying relations may be readily and reasonably disposed of by adhering to the rule above stated.

The miraculous powers existing in the church after the apostolic age, rest under a cloud that is not now to be thoroughly dispelled. But with safety the following propositions may be affirmed: first, That the Christian doctrine probably received some miraculous attestations after the death of the apostles; secondly, That so early as the commencement of the fourth century, fraudulent or deceptive pretensions to miraculous power were very frequently advanced; and lastly, That at that period, and subsequently, there are instances, not a few, of a certain sort of sincerity and fervor in religion, conjoined with very exceptionable attempts to acquire a thaumaturgal reputation. These deplorable cases deserve particular attention, especially as they show what are the natural fruits of fictitious pietism.

If we choose to read the church history of the early centuries in the spirit of frigid scepticism, all the toil and perplexity that belong to the exercise of cautious and candid discrimination will be at once saved; and we shall, in every instance, where supernatural interposition is alleged, and whatever may be the quality of the evidence, or the character of the facts, take up that obvious explanation which is offered, by attributing a greedy credulity to the laity of those times, and a villanous and shameless knavery to the clergy. But this short method, how satisfactory soever it may be to indolence, or how gratifying soever to malignity, can never approve itself to those who are at once well informed of facts, and accustomed to analyze evidence with precision. The compass of human nature includes many motives, deep, and intricate, of which infidelity never dreams, and which, in its unobservant arrogance, it can never comprehend.

Long before the time when ecclesiastical narratives of supernatural occurrences assume a character decidedly suspicious, or manifestly faithless, the great facts of Christianity had, with a large class of persons, and especially with the recluses, become the objects of day-dream contemplation, and formed rather the furniture of a theatre of celestial machinery, than the exciting causes of simple faith, and hope, and joy. The divine glories, the brightness of the future life, the history and advocacy of the Mediator, the agency of angels, and of demons, were little else, to many, than the incentives of intellectual intoxication. When once this misuse of religious ideas had gained possession of the mind, it brought with it an irresistible prurience, asking for the marvellous, just as voluptuousness asks for the aliments of pleasure. This demand will be peculiarly importunate among those who have to uphold their faith in the front of a gainsaying world; and who would much rather confound the scoffer by the blaze of a new miracle, than convince him by an argumentative appeal to an old one. The first step towards the pseudo-miraculous is taken without doing any violence to conscience, and little even to good sense; provided that opinions of a favoring kind are generally prevalent. Good, and even judicious men, might be so under the influence of the imagination as to have their sleep hurried with visions, and their waking meditations quickened by unearthly voices; and might complacently report such celestial favors to greedy hearers, without a particle of dishonest consciousness.[9] Thus the taste for things extraordinary was at once cherished and powerfully sanctioned by the example of men eminently wise and holy. Then, with an inferior class of men, the progression from illusions, real and complete, to such as were in part aided by a little spontaneity and contrivance, and which, though somewhat unsatisfactory to the narrator, were devoured without scruple by the hearer, could not be difficult. The temptation to produce a commodity so much in demand was strong; often too strong for those whose moral sense had been debilitated by an habitual inebriety of the imagination. Another step towards religious fraud was more easily taken than avoided, when it was eagerly looked for by open-mouthed credulity, and when the church might cheaply and securely be glorified, and Gentilism triumphantly confuted. The plain ground of Christian integrity having once been abandoned, the shocks of a downward progress towards the most reprehensible extreme of deception were not likely to awaken remorse.

Practices, therefore, which, viewed in their naked merits, must excite the detestation of every Christian mind, might insensibly gain ground among those who were far from deserving the designation of thorough knaves. They were fervent and laborious in their zeal to propagate Christianity; they believed it cordially, and themselves hoped for eternal life in their faith; and in the strength of this hope were ready "to give their bodies to be burned." They prayed, they watched, they fasted, and crucified the flesh, and did everything which an enthusiastical intensity of feeling could prompt; and this feeling prompted them to promote the gospel, as well by juggling as by preaching.

But had not these religious forgers read the unbending morality of the gospel? Or, reading it, was it possible that they could think the sacrifice of honesty an acceptable offering to the God of truth? The difficulty can be solved only by calculating duly the influence of imaginative pietism in paralyzing the conscience; and if the facts of the case still seem hard to comprehend, it will be necessary, for illustration, to recur to instances that may be furnished, alas! by most Christian communities in our own times. Is it impossible to find individuals fervent, and in a certain sense sincere, in their devotions, and zealous and liberal in their endeavors to diffuse Christianity, and, perhaps, in many respects amiable, who, nevertheless, admit into their habitual course of conduct very gross contrarieties to the plainest rules of Christian morality? When instances of this sort are under discussion, it is alike unsatisfactory to affirm of the parties in question, that they are, in the common sense of the term, hypocrites; or to grant that their piety is genuine, but defective. The first supposition, though it may cut the difficulty, does not by any means nicely accord with the facts: and the second puts contempt upon the most explicit and solemn declarations of our Lord and his ministers, whose style of enforcing the divine law will never allow those who are flagrantly vicious, those who are "workers of iniquity," to be called 'imperfect Christians.'

One alternative presents itself for the solution of the pressing difficulty. The religion of these delinquent professors is sincere in its kind, and perhaps fervent; but not less fictitious than sincere. Or rather the religion they profess is not Christianity, but an image of it. Whatever there is in the Gospel that may stimulate emotion without breaking up the conscience, has been admitted and felt; but the heart has not been made "alive towards God." Repentance has had no force, the desire of pardon no intensity. Certain vices may be shunned and reprobated, and others as freely indulged; for nothing is really inconsistent with the dreams of religious delusion—except only the waking energy of true virtue. And thus it was with many in the ancient church; the stupendous objects of the unseen world had kindled the imagination; and in harmony with this state of mind, a supernatural heroism and an unnatural style of virtue were admired and practised, because they fed the flames of a fictitious happiness, which compensated for the renunciation of the pleasures of sense. In this spirit martyrdom was courted, and deserts were peopled, until they ceased to be solitudes; and in this spirit also miracles were affirmed, or fabricated, not perhaps so often by knaves as by visionaries.

Tho subject of the suspicious pretensions to miraculous power advanced by many of the ancient Christian writers should not be dismissed without remarking, that it is one thing to compose a gaudy narrative (de virtutibus) of the wonder-working powers of a saint gone to his rest in the preceding century, and another to be the actor in scenes of religious juggling. If this distinction be duly considered, a very large mass of perplexing matter will at once be discharged from the page of ecclesiastical history, and that without doing the smallest violence either to charity, or to the laws of evidence. Some foolish presbyter, or busy monk, gifted with a talent of description, has collected the church tales current in his time, concerning a renowned father. The turgid biography, applauded in the monastery where it was produced, slipped away silently to the faithful of distant establishments, and without having ever undergone that ordeal of real and local publicity which authenticates common history, was suffused through Christendom, as it were, beneath the surface of notoriety, and so has come down to modern times to load the memory of some good man with unmerited disgrace.

V. The practice of mystifying the Scriptures must be named as an especial characteristic of monkish religion.

This practice was, in the first place, the natural fruit of a life like that of the recluses; for the Bible is a directory of common life; it is the heavenly enchiridion of those who are beset with the cares, labors, sorrows, and temptations of the world. To the anchoret it presents almost a blank page: a style of existence so unnatural as that which he has chosen, it does not recognize; his imaginary troubles, his frivolous duties, his visionary temptations, his self-inflicted sufferings, and his real difficulty of maintaining virtue under the galling friction of a presumptuous vow, are all absolutely unknown to the Scriptures, which therefore to the recluse, are not profitable for reproof, or correction, or for instruction in the false righteousness which he labors to establish.

To adapt the Bible to the cell, it must of necessity, be allegorized. Then indeed it becomes inexhaustibly rich in the materials of spiritual amusement. It was thus that the Jewish doctors, the authors of the Talmudical writings, found the means of diverting the heaviness of their leisure; and it was thus, though in a different style, that the Essenes of the wilderness of the Jordan whiled away the hours of their solitude; and thus, yet again after another pattern, that the Christian monks, especially those of Palestine[10] and Egypt, transmuted the words of truth and soberness into a tangled wreath of flimsy fable.

The doctrine of a mystical sense has invariably been espoused by every successive body of idle religionists; that is to say, by all who, spurning or forgetting the authority which the Scriptures assert over the life and conscience, convert them into the materials of a delicious dream. The mask of allegory imposed on the Bible, serves first as a source of entertainment, and then as a shelter against the plain meaning of all passages directly condemning the will-worship, the fooleries, and the extravagances to which persons of this temper are ever addicted. So did the rabbis make void the law of God; so did the monks; so have all classes of modern mystics; so do modern Antinomians: all have asserted a double, a treble, or a quadruple sense; a mystery couched beneath every narrative, and every exhortation, or even hidden in single words: or they have descried a profound doctrine packed in the bend of a Samech or a Koph. Not one of the absurdities of the ancient monkery has been so long-lived as this: nor is there to be found a more certain symptom of the existence of fatal illusion in matters of religion.

VI. The monkish system recommended itself by astonishing feats of devotedness, and by great proficiency in the practices of artificial and spontaneous virtue.

The excitements of enthusiasm are so much more congruous with the uncorrected impulses of human nature, than are the principles of genuine piety, that the former have usually far surpassed the latter, as motives, in the difficult and mortifying achievements of self-denial. In proportion as a system of fanaticism is remote from truth, its stimulating force is found to be great. Thus the fakirs of India have carried the feats of voluntary torture far beyond any other order of religionists. Mohammedans, generally, are more zealous, devout, and fervent than Christians. Romanists surpass Protestants in the solemnity, intensity, and scrupulosity of their devotional exercises. In conformity with this well-known principle, the monastic orders have had to boast, in all ages, of some prodigious instances of mortification, as well as of charitable heroism. And the boast might be allowed to win more praise than can be granted to it, if there were not manifest, invariably, in these exploits, a ferment of sinister feelings, quite incompatible with the simplicity and purity of Christian virtue.

For example, let a comparison be drawn between a daughter who, in the deep seclusion of private life, and without a spectator to applaud her virtue, cheerfully devotes her prime of years to the service of an afflicted parent;—and the nun, who inveigles beggars daily to the convent, where she absolves them, against their will, from their filth, dresses their ulcers, and cleanses their tatters. Assuredly the part she performs is more seemingly difficult, and far more revolting than that of the pious daughter; yet it is in fact more easy; for the inflated "sister of charity"[11] is sustained and impelled by notions of heroism, and of celestial excellence, and by a present recompense of fame among her sisterhood, of all which the other does not dream, who, unless she were actuated by the substantial motives of true goodness, could never in this manner win the blessing of heaven.

Self-inflicted penances, wasteful abstinences, fruitless labors, sanctimonious humiliations, and all such like spontaneities, may fairly be classed with those painful and perilous sports, in pursuing which it often happens that a greater amount of suffering is endured, and of danger incurred, than ordinarily belongs to the services and duties of real life. But these freaks of the monastery, or these toils of the field, deserve little praise, seeing that they meet their immediate reward in the gratification of a peculiar taste. In both instances the adult child pleases himself in his own way, and must be deemed to do much if he avoids trampling down the rights of his neighbor.

Fictitious virtue, if formed on the model of the Koran, naturally assumes the style of martial arrogance, of fanatical zeal and of bluff devotion. But if it be the Gospels that furnish the pattern, then an opposite phase of sanctity is shown. Abject lowliness, and voluntary poverty (which is no poverty at all,) and ingenious austerities, and romantic exploits of charity, and other similar misinterpretations of the spirit and letter of New Testament morality, are combined to form a tawdry effigy of the humility, purity, and beneficence of Christian holiness. But compel the imitator to relinquish all that is heroic, and picturesque, and poetical in his style of behavior: oblige him to lay aside whatever makes the vulgar gape at his sanctity; let him uncowl his ears, and cover his naked feet: ask him to acquit himself patiently, faithfully, Christianly, amid the non-illustrious and difficult duties of common life, and he will find himself destitute of motive and of zest for his daily task. Temperance without abstinence will have no charm for him; nor purity without a vow; nor self-denial without austerity; nor patience without stoicism; nor charity without a trumpet. The man of sackcloth, who was a prodigy of holiness in the cloister, becomes, if transported into the sphere of domestic life, a monster of selfishness and sensuality.

Time, which insensibly aggravates the abuses of every corrupt system, does also furnish an apology, more and more valid from age to age, for the conduct of the individuals who spring up, in succession, to act their parts within its machinery. While ancient institutions rest tranquilly on their bases, while venerable usages obtain unquestioned submission, while opinion paces forwards with a slumbering step upon its deep-worn tracks, men are not more conscious of the enormity of the errors that may be chargeable upon their creeds and practices, than a secluded tribe is of the strangeness and inelegance of the national costume. This principle should never be lost sight of when we are estimating the personal character of the members of the Romish church before the period of the Reformation; or indeed in later times, where no free and fair conflict of opinions has taken place. The system and its victims are always to be thought of apart.

The recurrence, by a people at large, to abstract principles of political or religious truth, is a much less frequent event than the rarest of natural phenomena. It is only in consequence of shocks, happening in the social system by no means so often as earthquakes do in the material, that the human mind is rent from its habitudes, and placed in a position whence it may with advantage compare its opinions with universal truth. The Christian church underwent not once the perils and benefits of such a convulsion during the long course of fifteen hundred years. Throughout that protracted space of time the men of each age, with few exceptions, quietly deemed that to be good which their fathers had thought so; and as naturally they delivered it to their successors, endorsed with their own solemn approbation. In forming an opinion, therefore, of the merits of individuals, justice, we need not say candor, demands that the whole, or almost the whole amount of the abstract error of the system within which, by accident of birth, they move, should be deducted from the reckoning. This sort of justice may especially be claimed in behalf of those who rather acquiesced in the religious modes of their times, than appeared as its active champions. Thus we excuse the originators and early supporters of a bad system, on the ground of their ignorance of its evil tendency and actual consequences; and again we palliate the fault of its adherents in a late age, by pleading for them the influence of that natural sentiment of respect which is paid to antiquity.

Perhaps the treatment which Jovinian and Vigilantius received from Jerom, Ambrose, and Augustine, may be thought to detract very much from the validity of the apology here offered for the ancient abettors of monachism. But the circumstances of the case are involved in too much obscurity to allow a distinct opinion to be formed on the subject. The protest of Jovinian against the prevailing errors of the church might be connected with some extravagance of belief, or some impropriety of conduct which prevented his testimony from being listened to with respect. Yet certainly the appearances of the case show decidedly against both Jerom and Ambrose. Augustine knew little personally of the supposed error against which he inveighed.

These proper allowances being made, there will be no difficulty in turning from an indignant reprobation of the monkish practices, to a charitable and consoling belief of the personal virtues, and even eminent piety of many who, in every age, have fretted away an unblessed existence within that dungeon of religious delusion—the monastery. In default of complete evidence, yet on the ground of some substantial proof, it is allowable to hope that the monastic orders at all times included many spiritual members.[12] There is even reason to believe that a better style of sentiment, and less extravagance, and less fanatical heat, and less knavish pretension, and more of humility and purity, existed here and there among the recluses of the tenth and eleventh, than among those of the fifth and sixth centuries.

In the earlier period, though there might be much pretension to seclusion from the world, the monastery was in fact a house set on a hill in the midst of the Christian community; and it was ever surrounded by an admiring multitude; so that its inmates might always find a ready revenue of glorification for the exploits and hypocrisies of supernatural sanctity.[13] But in the later periods, and when nothing hardly existed without doors except feudal ignorance and ferocity (we speak of the monasteries of Europe), many of the religious houses were real seclusions, and very far removed from any market of vulgar praise. Then within these establishments, it cannot be doubted, that the pious few found their virtue much rather guarded by the envious eyes of their less exemplary comrades, than endangered by drawing upon itself any sort of admiration. The spiritual monk (let not modern prejudices refuse to admit the phrase), glad to hide himself from the railleries or spite of the lax fraternity, kept close to his cell, and there passed his hours, not uncheered, nor undelicious, in prayer and meditation, in the perusal of religious books, and in the pleasant, edifying, and beneficial toils of transcription. Not seldom, as is proved by abundant evidence, the life-giving words of prophets and apostles were the subjects of these labors; nor ought it to be doubted that while, through a long tract of centuries, the Scriptures, unknown abroad, were holding their course underground, if one might so speak, waiting the time of their glorious emerging, they imparted the substance of true knowledge to many souls, pent with them in the same sepulchral glooms.

The monkish system retained its ancient style, with little alteration, until it received an enhancement, and a somewhat new character in France, in the hands of the followers of Jansen, and the Port Royal recluses. Then the old doctrine of religious abstraction—of the merging of the soul in Deity, and of the merit and efficacy of penitential suicide, was revived with an intensity never before known and was recommended by a much larger admixture of genuine scriptural knowledge than had ever before been connected with the same system, and was graced by the brilliant talents and great learning of many of the party; while at the same time the endurance of persecution gave depth, force, and heroism, to the sentiments of the sect.

It was inevitable that whatever of good might arise within the church of Rome, and remain in allegiance to it, must pass over to the ancient and venerated form of monkish piety. The religion of the monastery was the only sort of devotedness and seriousness known to, or sanctioned by, that church. A new sect of fervent religionists could therefore do no otherwise than either fall into that style, or denounce it; and the latter would have been to break from Rome, and to side with Huguenots.

Embarrassed at every step by their professed submission to the authority of the popes, which they perpetually felt to be at variance with the duty they owed to God, and heavily oppressed and galled by their necessary acquiescence in the flagrant errors of the church in which alone they thought salvation could be had, and still more deeply injured by their own zealously loved ascetic doctrine, these good men obtained possession, and made profession of, the great truths of Christianity under an incomparably heavier weight of disadvantage than has been sustained by any other class of Christians from the apostolic to the present times. They have left in their voluminous and valuable writings, a body of divinity, doctrinal and practical, which, when the peculiar circumstances of its production are considered, presents a matchless proof of the intrinsic power of Christianity, upbearing so ponderous a mass of error.

Nevertheless, while the Port Royal divines and their friends are perused with pleasure and advantage, and while the reader is often inclined to admit that in depth, fervor, and solemnity of religious feeling, in richness and elevation of thought, in holy abstraction from earthly interests, in devotedness of zeal, and in the exemplification of some difficult duties, they much surpass the divines of England, he still feels, and sometimes when he can hardly assign the grounds of his dissatisfaction, that a vein of illusiveness runs through every page. Although the great principles of religion are much more distinctly and more feelingly produced than generally they are in the writings of the fathers, and though the evidence of genuine and exalted piety is abundant and unquestionable; yet is there an infection of idealism, tainting every sentiment; a mist of the imagination, obscuring every doctrine. In turning from the French writers of this school to our own standard divines, the reader is conscious of a sensation that might be compared to that felt by one who escapes into pure air from a chamber in which, though it was possible to live, respiration was oppressed by the presence of mephitic exhalations.

Enfeebled by the enthusiasm to which they so fondly clung, the piety of these admirable men failed in the force necessary to carry them triumphantly through the conflict with their atrocious enemy—"the Society." They were themselves in too many points vulnerable, to close fearlessly with their adversary; and they grasped the sword of the Spirit in too infirm a manner to be able to drive home a deadly thrust. Had it been otherwise, had they been free, not merely from the shackle of submission to Rome, but free from the debilitating influence of mysticism and monkish notions, their moral force, their talent, their learning, and their self-devotion, might have sufficed, first, for the overthrow of their immediate antagonist, whose bad cause, and worse arguments were hardly supported against the augmenting weight of public opinion, even by the whole power of the court. Then might they, not improbably, have supplied the impulse necessary to achieve the emancipation of the Gallican church from the thraldom of Rome; an event which seemed, more than once, to be on the eve of accomplishment. And if, at the same moment, the Protestants of France had received just that degree of indulgence—of mere sufferance—which was demanded, we do not say by justice and mercy, but by a politic regard to the national welfare; and if by these means a substantially sound, though perhaps partial reform had taken place within the dominant church, and dissent been allowed to spread itself amicably through the interstices of the ecclesiastical structure; if religious liberty, not indeed in the temper of republican contumacy, but in the Christian spirit of quiet and grateful humility, had taken root in France, is it too much to say that Atheism could never have become, as it did, the national opinion, and that the consequent solution of the social system in blood could never have happened?

The Jansenist, and the inmates of Port Royal, and many of their favorers, displayed a constancy that would doubtless have carried them through the fires of martyrdom. But the intellectual courage necessary to bear them fearlessly through an examination of the errors of the papal superstition could have sprung only from a healthy force of mind, utterly incompatible with the dotings of religious abstraction, with the petty solicitudes of sackclothed abstinence, with the trivial ceremonials of the daily ritual, with the prim niceties of behavior that pin down the body and soul of a Romish regular to his parchment-pattern of artificial sanctity. The Jansenists had not such courage; if they worshipped not the beast, they cringed before him; he planted his dragon-foot upon their necks, and their wisdom and their virtues were lost forever to France!

The monk of Wittemberg had taken a bolder and a better course. When he began to find fault with Rome, he rejected, not only its own flagrant and recent corruptions: but the many delusions it had inherited from the ancient Church; and after a short struggle with the prejudices of his education, he became, not only no papist, but no monk. Full fraught with the principles and spirit of the Bible, he denounced, as well the venerable errors of the fathers, as the scarlet sins of the mother of impurities; and was as little a disciple of Jerom, of Gregory, and of Basil, as of the doctors of the Vatican.

The English reformers trod the ground of theological inquiry with the same manly step; and that firm step shook the monasteries to the dust. Those great and good men went back to the Scriptures, where they found at once the great realities of religion—a condemning law, a justifying Gospel, and a provision of grace for a life of true holiness. With these substantial principles in their hearts, they spurned whatever was trivial and spurious, and amid the fires of persecution, they reared the structure—a structure still unshaken—of religion for England, upon "the foundation of the apostles and prophets." Had there existed a taste for mysticism, a fondness for penitential austerities, a cringing deference to the fathers, among the divines of the time of Edward VI., such a disposition must, so far as known causes are to be calculated upon, have utterly spoiled the reformation in England; or have postponed it a hundred years.

[6] In the only places in the New Testament where celibacy is recommended, Matt. xix. 12, and 1 Cor. vii. 32, the reason is of this substantial and intelligible kind, namely, that in the case of individuals, placed in peculiar circumstances, a single life would be advantageous, inasmuch as it would give them better opportunity of serving the Lord without distraction. Precisely the same advice might sometimes with propriety be given to a soldier, or to a statesman: a high motive justifies a sacrifice of personal happiness. Nowhere in the discourses of our Lord, or in the writings of the apostles, is there to be discovered a trace of the monkish motives of celibacy—namely, the supposed superior sanctity of that state.

[7] "Grande est et immortale, poene ultra naturam corpoream, superare luxuriam, et concupiscentiÆ spasmeam adolescentiÆ facibus accensam animi virtute restinguere, et spiritali conatu vim genuinÆ oblectationis excludere, viverÉque contra humani generis legem, despicere solatia conjugii, dulcedinem contemnere liberorum, quÆcumque esse prÆsentis vitÆ commoda possint, pro nihilo spe futurorum beatitudinis computare." The Epistle of Sulpitius de Virginitate, in which this passage occurs, contains, it should be confessed, much more good sense and good morality, in the latter part of it, than one would expect to find in conjunction with absurdities such as that above quoted. The annotator on the passage well says, that the Ascetics avoided the pleasures of domestic life, not because they were sweets, but because conjoined with great cares, which those escaped who lived in celibacy. Nor is it to be denied, says he, that married life is obnoxious to great and heavy inconveniences: nevertheless, if under those difficulties we live holily and religiously, our future recompense will surely not be less than as if, to be free from them we had embraced a single life.

[8] "Habitant plerique in eremo sine ullis tabernaculis quos Anachoretas vocant. Vivunt herbarum radicibus: nullo unquam certo loco consistunt, ne ab hominibus frequententur: quas nox coËgerit sedes habent.... Inter hujus (Sina) recessus Anachoreta esse aliquis ferebatur quem diu multumque quÆsitum videre non potui, qui ferÈ jam ante quinquaginta annos À conversatione human remotus, nullo vestis usu, setis corporis sui tectus, nuditatem suam divino munere vestiebat. Hic quoties eum religiosi viri adire voluerunt, cursu avia petens, congressus vitabat humanos. Uni tantummodo ferebatur se ante quinquennium prÆbuisse, qui credo potenti fide id obtinere promeruit: cui inter multa conloquia percunctanti, cur homines tantopere vitaret, respondisse perhibetur, Eum qui ab hominibus frequentaretur non posse ab angelis frequentari."—Sulp. Sev. Dialog. I.

[9] The two signal instances may be mentioned of Cyprian and Augustine, men whose honesty and sincerity will not be questioned by any one who himself possesses the sympathies of virtue and integrity. They were both carried by the spirit of their times almost to the last stage of credulity and self-delusion; but the latter much farther than the former.

[10] Origen, as every one knows, led the way in the Christian Church in this mode of interpretation. It is also well known that the monks, especially those of Alexandria, warmly espoused the cause of this ingenious writer against the bishops and clergy, who with equal warmth condemned his works as heretical.

[11] The charitable offices of the nuns in the hospitals of France ought always to be mentioned with respect and admiration.

[12] The "De Imitatione Christi" alone affords proof enough of the possibility of the existence of elevated piety in the monastery. It abounds also with indications of the petty persecution to which a spiritual monk was exposed among his brethren.

[13] Many of the ancient solitaries, far from living as their profession required, in seclusion, were accustomed to admit daily the visits of the multitude who flocked around them, to gaze at their austerities, to hear their harangues, or to be exorcised, or healed of their maladies. Symeon, "the man of the pillar," every day exhibited himself to a gaping crowd, collected often from distant countries. St. Anthony, more sincere in his love of retirement, when pestered by the plaudits of the vulgar in Lower Egypt, withdrew into a desert of the ThebaÏs; yet even there he soon found himself surrounded, not only by dÆmons, but worse, by admirers. See Athan. Op. Vita S. Antonii.