So fell in England that institution which, for twelve centuries, had exercised marvelous dominion over the spiritual and temporal interests of the continent, and for eight hundred years had suffered or thrived on English soil.  “The day came, and that a drear winter day, when its last mass was sung, its last censer waved, its last congregation bent in rapt and lovely adoration before the altar.”  Its majestic and solemn ruins proclaim its departed grandeur.  Its deeds of mercy, its conflicts with kings and bishops, its prayers and chants and penances, its virtues and its vices, its trials and its victories, its wealth and its poverty, all are gone.  Silence and death keep united watch over cloister and tomb.  We should be ungrateful if we forgot its blessings; we should be untrue if, ignoring its evils, we sought to bring back to life that which God has laid in the sepulcher of the dead.

     “Where pleasant was the spot for men to dwell,
     Amid its fair broad lands the abbey lay,
     Sheltering dark orgies that were shame to tell,
     And cowled and barefoot beggars swarmed the way,
     All in their convent weeds of black, and white, and gray.

     From many a proud monastic pile, o’erthrown,
     Fear-struck, the brooded inmates rushed and fled;
     The web, that for a thousand years had grown
     O’er prostrate Europe, in that day of dread
     Crumbled and fell, as fire dissolves the flaxen thread.”

     —­Bryant.

VIII

CAUSES AND IDEALS OF MONASTICISM

All forms of religious character and conduct are grounded in certain cravings of the soul, which, in seeking satisfaction, are influenced by theoretical opinions.  The longings of the human heart constitute the impulse, or the energy, of religion.  The intellectual convictions act as guiding forces.  As a religious type, therefore, the monk was produced by the action of certain desires, influenced by specific opinions respecting God, the soul, the body, the world and their relations.

The existence of monasticism in non-Christian religions implies that whatever impetus the ascetic impulses in human nature received from Christian teaching, there is some broader basis for monastic life than the tenets of any creed.  Biblical history and Christian theology furnish some explanation of the rise of Christian monasticism, but they do not account for the monks of ancient India.  The teachings of Jesus exerted a profound influence upon the Christian monks, but they cannot explain the Oriental asceticism that flourished before the Christ of the New Testament was born.  There must have been some motive, or motives, operating on human nature as such, a knowledge of which will help to account for the monks of Indian antiquity as well as the begging friars of modern times.  It will therefore be in order to begin the present inquiry by seeking those causes which gave rise to monasticism in general.