Such was the monastic ideal and such were some of the means employed to realize it.  The ascetic spirit manifests itself in a great variety of ways, but all these visible and changing externals have one common source.  “To cherish the religious principle,” says William E. Channing,” some have warred against their social affections, and have led solitary lives; some against their senses, and have abjured all pleasure in asceticism; some against reason, and have superstitiously feared to think; some against imagination, and have foolishly dreaded to read poetry or books of fiction; some against the political and patriotic principles, and have shrunk from public affairs,—­all apprehending that if they were to give free range to their natural emotions their religious life would be chilled or extinguished.”

IX

THE EFFECTS OF MONASTICISM

“We read history,” said Wendell Phillips, “not through our eyes but through our prejudices.”  Yet if it were possible entirely to lay aside one’s prepossessions respecting monastic history, it would still be no easy task to estimate the influences of the monks upon human life.

In every field of thought and activity monasticism wrought good and evil.  Education, industry, government and religion have been both furthered and hindered by the monks.  What Francis Parkman said of the Roman Catholic Church is true of the monastic institution:  “Clearly she is of earth, not of heaven; and her transcendently dramatic life is a type of the good and ill, the baseness and nobleness, the foulness and purity, the love and hate, the pride, passion, truth, falsehood, fierceness, and tenderness, that battle in the restless heart of man.”

A careful and sympathetic survey of monastic history compels the conclusion that monasticism, while not uniformly a blessing to the world, was not an unmitigated evil.  The system presents one long series of perplexities and contradictions.  One historian shuts his eyes to its pernicious effects, or at least pardons its transgressions, on the ground that perfection in man or in institutions is unattainable.  Another condemns the whole system, believing that the sum of its evils far outweighs whatever benefits it may have conferred upon mankind.  Schaff cuts the Gordian knot, maintaining that the contradiction is easily solved on the theory that it was not monasticism, as such, which has proved a blessing to the Church and the world.  “It was Christianity in monasticism,” he says, “which has done all the good, and used this abnormal mode of life as a means of carrying forward its mission of love and peace.”