L. And how vain both! with the Jews, and with all of us.  But the fact is, that the threat and promise are simply statements of the Divine law, and of its consequences.  The fact is truly told you,—­ make what use you may of it:  and as collateral warning, or encouragement, or comfort, the knowledge of future consequences may often be helpful to us; but helpful chiefly to the better state when we can act without reference to them.  And there’s no measuring the poisoned influence of that notion of future reward on the mind of Christian Europe, in the early ages.  Half the monastic system rose out of that, acting on the occult pride and ambition of good people (as the other half of it came of their follies and misfortunes).  There is always a considerable quantity of pride, to begin with, in what is called “giving one’s self to God.”  As if one had ever belonged to anybody else!

Dora.  But, surely, great good has come out of the monastic system —­our books,—­our sciences—­all saved by the monks?

L. Saved from what, my dear?  From the abyss of misery and ruin which that false Christianity allowed the whole active world to live in.  When it had become the principal amusement, and the most admired art of Christian men, to cut one another’s throats, and burn one another’s towns; of course the few feeble or reasonable persons left, who desired quiet, safety, and kind fellowship, got into cloisters; and the gentlest, thoughtfullest, noblest men and women shut themselves up, precisely where they could be of least use.  They are very fine things, for us painters, now—­the towers and white arches upon the tops of the rocks; always in places where it takes a day’s climbing to get at them; but the intense tragi-comedy of the thing, when one thinks of it, is unspeakable.  All the good people of the world getting themselves hung up out of the way of mischief, like Bailie Nicol Jarvie;—­poor little lambs, as it were, dangling there for the sign of the Golden Fleece; or like Socrates in his basket in the “Clouds”! (I must read you that bit of Aristophanes again, by the way.) And believe me, children, I am no warped witness, as far as regards monasteries; or if I am, it is in their favor.  I have always had a strong leaning that way; and have pensively shivered with Augustines at St. Bernard; and happily made hay with Franciscans at Fesole; and sat silent with Carthusians in their little gardens, south of Florence; and mourned through many a day-dream, at Melrose and Bolton.  But the wonder is always to me, not how much, but how little, the monks have, on the whole, done, with all that leisure, and all that good-will!  What nonsense monks characteristically wrote;—­what little progress they made in the sciences to which they devoted themselves as a duty,—­medicine especially;—­and, last and worst, what depths of degradation they can sometimes see one another, and the population round them, sink into; without either doubting their system, or reforming it!