descended to us by any other channel." | nachism never led its votaries in the West We may well feel grateful, then, even for the superstition which sometimes made a penance of such Herculean labours. Another form of western asceticism was fasting, but this was not carried usually to any excessive or unreasonable extent. St. Columban, of Banchor, in Ireland, and afterwards a missionary on the continent, born in 540, and whom Guizot represents as a type of a very large class of monks, says:-"Do not suppose that it suffices for us to fatigue the dust of our body with fasts and vigils, if we do not also reform our manners. To mortify the flesh, if the soul fructifies not, is to labour incessantly at the earth without making it produce any harvest; it is to construct a statue of gold outside, and of mud within." Nor is such self-denial, performed in a proper spirit, contrary to scripture. Our Lord, in warning his disciples against an abuse of it, does not forbid it, but says, "When ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance. But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head and wash thy face; that thou appear not unto men to fast, but to thy Father which is in secret: and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly." And in another place he says, that after his departure his children shall fast (Matt. ix. 16), which we find his apostles and disciples did (Acts x. 30; xiii. 2; xiv. 23, &c.), appearing to consider it as conferring special gifts and graces. And St. Paul's advice to the same effect (1 Cor. vii. 5, &c.), with a host of passages in the gospels and epistles, enjoining selfdenial, may serve to show that those who refine upon Christianity till they make it consist in a mere intellectual belief of certain historical facts, may not possess one whit more of its real spirit, the perfection of which is charity, than the self-mortifying devotees of old. If the latter sometimes laid too much stress upon particular portions of holy writ, we can at least trace some beneficial effects of their mistake: let us hope that the opposite extreme of their opponents may not lead men into rationalism and infidelity. But let these self-imposed austerities have been what they may,-and it is not denied that they sometimes overleaped the boundaries of prudence, it is certain Mo to neglect the duties from man to man, to abandon their fellow-creatures, or to hide their virtues: these are charges which could only have been prompted by an ignorance of fact, or by a supposition of ignorance in readers. The great historian of the dark ages, already quoted, who certainly cannot be charged with any partiality for monastic institutions, says that in their original principles, and the rules by which they ought at least to have been governed, there was a character of meekness, self-denial, and charity, that could not be effaced, and that "in the relief of indigence the monks did not fall short of their profession, and their virtues assumed a still higher character when they stood forward as protectors of the oppressed." More than this: they were active and zealous missionaries; by them the banner of the cross was, we know, unfurled in almost every country in Europe; and when circumstances required it, they freely offered themselves as martyrs for the religion of Jesus. Thus in Spain no less than two hundred monks of the Benedictine order of San Pedro de Cardena are recorded to have been put to death, in A.D. 834, by a Mahomedan general; and missionaries of the same order had penetrated, as early as the time of Mieceslas I., King of Poland (A.D. 962), into that hitherto barbarous and idolatrous region. It was an English monk, Sigefrid, sent as a missionary by Ethelred to Sweden, who sealed the establishment of Christianity in that country by baptizing the king, Olaf Skotkonung, and his family; and the French historian, Geffroy, gives a most interesting account of the labours, dangers, and sufferings of the monk St. Anschaire and his companions, who introduced the light of revealed truth into the north of Europe.* Another useful feature in monasteries was their educational activities. They were for centuries the training schools of those who were to serve God, both in church and state, and among all classes of society. Religious contemplation, for which the cloister offered unusual facilities, must of itself have led many into a much deeper acquaint evidence that the monks did much to better the condition of agriculture. Few other classes had either the opportunity or the will to make the best methods of tillage a study, and fewer still the hardihood to attempt, as they often did, to reclaim bog and waste land. At most monasteries it was customary to devote several hours daily to the cultivation of the field; and their domains were the flower and fruit gardens of almost every country in Europe. From Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, in the twelfth century, whom Mosheim allows to have been a man of taste and genius, and of just and penetrating judgment, we learn what an abbot could do in his time: he "understood buildings, the management of fields, gardens, and waters, and all the arts of husbandry; was a perfect master in all trades, and could teach bricklayers, workers in iron, shoe ance than we are apt to suspect with the great truths of theology-must have drawn off their minds from earthly things, to dwell on the life and precepts of their Redeemer. Most monks probably had access to some part of the book which alone could "feed them by the way with food divine;" and if they have failed to transmit to us learned commentaries on that book, let us remember the immense difficulties there were in the execution of such works; let us ask our selves whether their morality may not have been of a more pure and practical, and less showy character than ours. Be this as it may, there is irrefragable evidence that the monks were zealous, if not intelligent, agents in the work of education. In the monasteries were schools, and the most distinguished monks gave instruction both to the members of the congregation, and to the young people sent to them to be educated. Lec-makers, and weavers." Nor did English tures were given, which the monks were bound to attend, and afterwards they held conferences among themselves upon the subject of the lecture; and these conferences, says Guizot, "became a powerful means of intellectual development and instruction." In English monastic schools, boys were carefully educated--sometimes, if of gentle blood, by the abbots themselves. They were received from seven years of age, and were taught singing, music, the septenary arts, Latin (in which Virgil was the favourite author), sometimes agriculture and mechanical arts, and, after the Conquest, French. Guizot has most ably defended the general intellectual development of the monastic period from the aspersions that have been cast on it, and has traced the latter to a misunderstanding of the spirit of the age, which failed to produce a standard literature, because all studies had entirely a practical aim and character; because science and eloquence were regarded simply as means of action for government, and because the intellectual activity, which he says existed in an eminent degree, was one entirely of application of circumstance, and confined itself entirely to the present. "This epoch produced few books, and yet it was fertile and powerful over minds;" and the writings it produced, "from the ardour which reigns in them, attest a rare movement of mind, and form a true and rich literature." Again; there is ample and conclusive abbots of the same period yield the palm, in the extent and variety of their attainments, to their continental brethren. Not only did they possess skill in writing and illuminating, but we find they were frequently physicians, as well as versed in agriculture, which they taught to numerous pupils, for agriculture was a chief branch of baronial education. By arts like these, aided by the munificence of pious and benevolent individuals, the monks often acquired extensive possessions; but it is acknowledged, even by one whose enmity to Christianity seldom allowed him to speak fairly of any of its institutions, that "as long as they maintained their original fervour, they approved themselves the faithful and benevolent stewards of the charity which was entrusted to their care;" and a writer of better spirit than Gibbon, observes that monasteries "by no means cumbered the ground; they were the houses of correction, the agricultural colleges of their day; they cleared the backwoods of Europe, and erected her schools and hospitals; they were, moreover, what the Buddhist monasteries are at present in China, inns for travellers of all degrees." Another writer, who, though strictly protestant, was deeply versed in monastic history, and of no mean reputation, says that the monks, "if they no longer lived by the labours of their hands, but on the endowments of the rich, were active clergymen in their own immediate neighbourhoods; they exercised hospitality without grudging; they fed the poor; they clothed the naked; they instructed the ignorant," &c. History, then, it would seem, rebuts the charge that Monachism led its votaries to neglect the calls of humanity. But it does more: an infidel historian would attribute to their influence the darkness which reigned in the Middle Ages-would have us measure the change they had produced in Europe, by the beginning of the fifth century, by the interval "between the philosophic writings of Cicero and the legend of Theodoret between the character of Cato and that of Simeon." But history steps in and proves, by scores of witnesses, that neither Christianity nor the monastic system produced the evil condition of the Roman empire in the fifth century, but causes which had been in operation before either. And further; no impartial and truly christian student can doubt that, in many respects, the age of Theodoret and Simeon was a better age, and had more elements of hopefulness, than that immediately succeeding the christian era, which, as depicted to us by the pencils of Horace, Juvenal, and Tacitus, was rotten to its very core. The infidel would fain hide the fearful deformities of pagan slavery, and rob Christianity of the credit of the amelioration it wrought in this and many other respects; but those who love truth will not be so easily cheated. And Monachism, as the chosen handmaid of religion, was an active agent in the same cause, redeeming the captive, or lightening his bonds, and disarming war of a part of its terrors. This it did most effectually by fostering a theological spirit—a spirit which Guizot, after noticing that it was for a long period in a manner the blood which ran in the veins of the European world, asserts and proves to have been salutary--that "not only has it sustained and fertilized the intellectual movement in Europe, but that the system of doctrines and precepts, under the name of which it implanted the movement, was far superior to anything with which the ancient world was acquainted." Thus have our two subsidiary propositions been made good, and Monachism proved to have conferred many signal benefits on the old and new phases of European *Vol. i., p. 114. life. Combining these particulars into one whole, what a vast aggregate of influences, moral, intellectual, and physical, do they present, all operating towards the consummation of the highest object of the highest philosophy-" the restoration in man of the lost image of his Maker." And every view we take of the old world confirms the impression thus made upon our minds. Comparing the most refined people of antiquity, the Greeks, and their manners; their treatment, for instance, of slaves; their horrid butcheries in cold blood of prisoners in war, when they could not keep them for slaves; such institutions as the krypteia at Sparta; and the loose language of their very best writers, as of Plato, on excesses which revelation tells us it is "a shame even to speak of;"-comparing these with the worst features of modern European nations, what an immense interval in all that can elevate man, in faith, hope, and charity, appears between the two eras: the one is civilization without humanity or religion, the other is civilization impregnated with, and humanized by religion-a change undoubtedly owing to the prevalence of a truth which monastic institutions helped to promulgate-to a religious spirit which any institution or philosophical system might justly be proud of having produced or fostered. And who that considers the general fate of history-that the vices, especially, of ecclesiastics attract most attention, and are carefully recorded, while their virtues are passed unnoticed, so that we probably know least of the best men and generations past,-who, knowing this, will venture to set bounds to the effect Monachism may have had in producing a fervent religious spirit throughout Europe? Allowing, therefore, the utmost scope and latitude to all positive evidence against some of its professors; granting that they were, even frequently, guilty of gross inconsistencies, and the apparent authors of much mischief; yet, when the institution is considered in the aggregate, and the sum total of its effects is put into the balance; when it is seen to present an embodiment of the idea which centuries and nations, of the most diverse habits, language, and character, were striving to realize, and which is reflected in their history, as they emerged from the darkness of heathenism into the light, before they were quite fitted to receive 66 the liberty of christian truth; when, in addition to all that has been, urged, it appears that as morning was ever the daughter of night," though enveloped and overspread (its enemies being witnesses) with the gloom of the dark ages, it accelerated, by the dispersion of its vast libraries and fervent spirit, the progress of the light when it began to break, may we not reasonably distrust a criticism which would trace such a significant historical fact entirely to secondary causes, or to evil agencies-which would conceive that it served no great moral purpose in the will of Him who "seeth not as man seeth," who "doeth all things after the counsel of his own will," "who hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of our habitation;" in whom "we live, and move, and have our being;" "of whom, and through whom, and to whom are all things." Unless we would repudiate or vilify the revelation in history of His will towards us, surely we are bound to wrest, if possible, from the hands of such men as Gibbon, and even Mosheim, a weapon which the infidel cannot but find of deadly advantage against our peace-which the cold or incautious Christian may trifle with, till he seriously injure himself or his brethren. F. J. L., B.A., Associate of King's College, London. Politics. WAS THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT JUSTIFIED IN ENTERING UPON THE PRESENT WAR WITH RUSSIA? NEGATIVE ARTICLE.-I. A SOLUTION of this question is possible in two ways. We may either establish the principle that all war is unjustifiable, or we may confine ourselves to such arguments as in our opinion prove the unjustifiableness of the present war. The first of these methods is to our mind at once the most exhaustive and the most satisfactory. It necessitates the discussion of principles rather than facts -principles applicable, not to any particular war, but to every war. It thus supersedes, to a considerable extent at least, reference to events which it is scarcely possible to approach without imperilling that calm and impartial investigation of them necessary to see the subject before us in its true light. The fact, however, that the question of war, abstractedly considered, has been already debated in the British Controversialist,* renders it advisable to adopt on the present occasion a different method. A better we cannot select under the circumstances than the second we have named-viz., to state such arguments as seem to us conclusive that the British government was not justified in entering upon the present war. Let us first, however, advert to a few of the * Vide Vol. i. facts connected with what we deem its origin. Disputes of a most unseemly character had sprung up between the Greek and Latin churches in Syria, regarding certain buildings there, known as "the Holy Places." So high did these squabbles sometimes run, that the Turkish authorities frequently interposed between the rival claimants. How far these interpositions were judiciously effected we may fairly question. One thing, at least, is certain-they failed to remove the evil complained of. The quarrels, in spite of them, continued as violent as ever. In this condition were affairs when Louis Napoleon first appeared on the scene. The contest had hitherto been limited to the petty region where it originated. Under the fostering care of the French President it speedily permeated every corner of Europe. He saw in it, doubtless, a means of engaging the attention of the volatile people over whom he presided. He perceived its probable value in drawing around him the attachment of the priests and others clinging to the Romish communion. Even the title, which he now claimed, of Protector of the Holy Places, was of itself worthy of a struggle. With heart and soul therefore he threw him |