as a protest, not only against the general laxity of morals, but also against the faithlessness of corrupt monks.  Harnack says:  “It was always monasticism that rescued the church when sinking, freed her when secularized, defended her when attacked.  It warmed hearts that were growing cold, restrained unruly spirits, won back the people when alienated from the church.”  It may have been in harmony with divine plans, that religion was to have been kept alive and vigorous by excessive austerities, even as in later days it needed the stern and unyielding Puritan spirit, now regarded as too grim and severe, to cope successfully with the forces of tyranny and sin.

If it be true, as some are inclined to believe, that this age is losing a definite consciousness of sin, that in the reaction from the asceticism of the monks and the gloom of the Puritans we are in danger of minimizing the doctrine of personal accountability to God, then we cannot afford to ignore the underlying ideal of monasticism.  In so far as monasticism contributed to a normal consciousness of human freedom and personal guilt, and maintained a grip upon the conscience of the sinner, it has rendered the cause of true religion a genuine and permanent service.

But the mistake of the monks was twofold.  They exaggerated sin, and they employed unhealthy methods to get rid of it.  Excessive introspection, instead of exercising a purifying influence, tends to distort one’s religious conceptions, and creates an unwholesome type of piety.  Man is a sinner, but he also has potential and actual goodness.  The monks failed to define sin in accordance with facts.  Many innocent pleasures and legitimate satisfactions were erroneously thought to be sinful.  Honorable and useful aspirations that, under wise control, minister to man’s highest development were selected for eradication.  “Every instinct of human nature,” says W.E.  Channing, “has its destined purpose in life, and the perfect man is to be found in the proportionate cultivation of each element of his character, not in the exaggerated development of those faculties which are deemed primarily good, nor in the repression of those which are evil only when their prominence destroys the balance of the whole.”

But the methods employed by the monks to get rid of sin afford another illustration of the fact that noble sentiments and holy aspirations need to be wisely directed.  It is not enough for a mother to love her child; she must know how to give that love proper expression.  In her attempt to guide and train her loved one she may fatally mislead him.  The modern emphasis upon method deserves wider recognition than it has received.

The applause of the church that sounded so sweet in the ears of the monk, as he laid the stripes upon his body, proclaims the high esteem in which penance was held.  But the monk cruelly deceived himself.  His self-inflicted tortures developed within his soul an unnatural piety, “a piety,” says White, “that became visionary and introspective, a theology of black clouds and lightning and thunder, a superstitious religion based on dreams and saint’s bones.”  True penitence consists in high and holy purposes, in pure and unselfish living, and not in disfigurements and in misery.  Dreariness and fear are not the proper manifestations of that perfect love which casteth out fear.