The crying need of Christianity to-day is a willingness on the part of Christ’s followers to live for others instead of self.  Men and women are needed who, like many of the monks and nuns, will identify themselves with the toiling multitudes, and who will forego the pleasures of the world and the prospects of material gain or social preferment, for the sake of ministering to a needy humanity.  The essence of Christianity is a love to God and man that expresses itself in terms of social service and self-sacrifice.  Monasticism helped to preserve that noble essence of all true religion.  But a revival of the apostolic spirit in these times would not mean a triumph for monasticism.  Stripped of its rigid vows of celibacy, poverty and obedience, monasticism is dead.

The spirit of social service, the insistence upon soul-purity, and the craving for participation in the divine nature, are the fruits of Christianity, not of monasticism, which merely sought to carry out the Christian ideal.  But it is not necessary, in order to realize this ideal, to wage war on human nature.  True Christianity is perfectly compatible with wealth, health and social joys.  The realms of industry, politics and home-life are a part of God’s world.  A religious ideal based on a distorted view of social life, that involves a renunciation of human joy and the extinction of natural desires, and that prohibits the free exercise of beneficent faculties, as conditions of its realization, can never establish its right to permanent and universal dominion.  The faithful discharge of unromantic, secular duties, the keeping of one’s heart pure in the midst of temptation, and the unheralded altruism of private life, must ever be as welcome in the sight of God as the prayers of the recluse, who scorns the world of secular affairs.

True religion, the highest religion, is possible beyond the walls of churches and convents.  The so-called secular employments of business and politics, of home and school, may be conducted in a spirit of lofty consecration to the Eternal, and so carried on, may, in their way, minister to the highest welfare of humanity.  The old distinction, therefore, between the secular and the sacred is pernicious and false.  There are some other sacred things besides monasteries and prayers.  Human life itself is holy; so are the commonplace duties of the untitled household and factory saints.

     “God is in all that liberates and lifts,
     In all that humbles, sweetens, and consoles.”

Modern monasticism has forsaken the column of St. Simeon Stylites and the rags of St. Francis.  It has given up the ancient and fantastic feats of asceticism, and the spiritual extravagances of the early monks.  The old monasticism never could have arisen under a religious system controlled by natural and healthful spiritual ideas.  It has no attractions for minds unclouded by superstition.  It has lost its hold upon the modern man because the ancient ideas of God and his world, upon which it thrived, have passed away.