Wondrous changes have taken place in those dark and troubled years since Benedict began his labors at Monte Cassino, in 529.  The monk has prayed alone in the mountains, and converted the barbarian in the forest.  He has preached the crusades in magnificent cathedrals, and crossed stormy seas in his frail bark.  He has made the schools famous by his literary achievements, and taught children the alphabet in the woodland cell.  He has been good and bad, proud and humble, rich and poor, arrogant and gentle.  He has met the shock of lances on his prancing steed, and trudged barefoot from town to town.  He has copied manuscripts in the lonely Scottish isle, and bathed the fevered brow of the pilgrim in the hospital at Jerusalem.  He has dug ditches, and governed the world as the pope of the Church.  He has held the plow in the furrow, and thwarted the devices of the king.  He has befriended the poor, and imposed penance upon princes.  He has imitated the poverty and purity of Jesus, and aped the pomp and vice of kings.  He has dwelt solitary on cold mountains, subsisting on bread, roots and water, and he has surrounded himself with menials ready to gratify every luxurious wish, amid the splendor of palatial cloisters.  Still there are new types and phases of monasticism yet to appear.  The monk has other tasks to undertake, for the world is not yet sufficiently wearied of his presence to destroy his cloister and banish him from the land.

V

THE MENDICANT FRIARS

Abraham Lincoln only applied a general principle to a specific case when he said, “This nation cannot long endure half slave and half free.”  Glaring inconsistencies between faith and practice will eventually destroy any institution, however lofty its ideal or noble its foundation.  God suffers long and is kind, but His forbearance is not limitless.  Monasticism, as has been shown, was never free from serious inconsistency, from moral dualism.  But the power of reform prolonged its existence.  It was constantly producing fresh models of its ancient ideals.  It had a hidden reserve-force from which it supplied shining examples of a living faith and a self-denying love, just at the time when it seemed as if the system was about to perish forever.  When these fresh exhibitions of monastic fidelity likewise became tarnished, when men had tired of them and predicted the speedy collapse of the institution, forth from the cloister came another body of monkish recruits, to convince the world that monasticism was not dead; that it did not intend to die; that it was mightier than all its enemies.  The day came, however, when the world lost its confidence in an institution which required such constant reforming to keep it pure, which demanded so much cleansing to keep it clean.  Ideals that could so quickly lose their influence for good came to be looked upon with suspicion.