except to reverence, to sympathy, to love.  We must remember that the men who wrote these stories, and who practised these austerities, were the same men who composed our liturgies, who built our churches and our cathedrals—­and the gothic cathedral is, perhaps, on the whole, the most magnificent creation which the mind of man has as yet thrown out of itself.  If there be any such thing as a philosophy of history, real or possible, it is in virtue of there being certain progressive organizing laws in which the fretful lives of each of us are gathered into and subordinated in some larger unity.  Thus age is linked on to age, as we are moving forward, with an horizon for ever expanding and advancing.  And if this is true, the magnitude of any human phenomenon is a criterion of its importance, and definite forms of thought working through long historic periods imply an effect of one of these vast laws. —­imply a distinct step in human progress; something previously unrealized is being lived out, and rooted into the heart of mankind.  Nature never half does her work.  She goes over it, and over it, to make assurance sure, and makes good her ground with wearying repetition.  A single section of a short paper is but a small space to enter on so vast an enterprise, nevertheless, a few very general words shall be ventured as a suggestion of what this monastic or saintly spirit may possibly have meant.

First, as the spirit of Christianity is antagonistic to the world whatever form the spirit of the world assumes, the ideals of Christianity will of course be their opposite; as one verges into one extreme the other will verge into the contrary.  In those rough times the law was the sword; animal might of arm, and the strong animal heart which guided it, were the excellences which the world rewarded, and monasticism, therefore, in its position of protest, would be the destruction and abnegation of the animal.  The war hero in the battle or the tourney yard might be taken as the apotheosis of the fleshly man, the saint in the desert of the spiritual.  But this is slight, imperfect, and if true at all only partially so.  The animal and the spiritual are not contradictories; they are the complements in the perfect character; and in the middle ages, as in all ages of genuine earnestness, interfused and penetrated each other.  There were warrior saints and saintly warriors; and those grand old figures which sleep cross-legged in the cathedral aisles were something higher than only one more form of the beast of prey.  Monasticism represented something more positive than a protest against the world.  We believe it to have been the realization of the infinite loveliness and beauty of personal purity.