66 the monks took great pleasure in buying and collecting books, and would have them at any price. Poor as they were, at least in the earlier times, and poor as they always remained in some respects, they never had any scruples in possessing a rich library. Guibert declares, that to make up in some sort for the austere fasts to which they subjected the body, the earlier Carthusians provided by their wellfilled libraries abundant food for the mind. Nor were they satisfied with merely begging and buying books: in every house, two or more monks, the ablest of the fraternity, were constantly engaged in the arduous task of collating and transcribing. Fulda, as we have observed, thus employed twelve. At the same time, with a generous liberality, their libraries were thrown open to every learned and inquiring neighbour. Of the studious habits of the monks themselves we have many affecting instances. They were never idle," says an author already quoted, "but either writing good and godly works, or studying the Holy Scriptures.' Nothing is pleasanter," says Trithemius, "nothing more delightful than reading. I have passed nights without sleep, studying the Scriptures, and omitted to take my meals in order to save time for reading." "The monks," exclaims Richard of Bury, "who are so venerable, are accustomed to be solicitous, in regard to books, and to be delighted in their company, as with all riches, and thence it is that we find in most monasteries such splendid treasures of erudition, giving delectable light to the path of laics. O that devout labour of their hands in writing books!......Truly the love of books is the love of wisdom, and a sensual and avaricious life cannot be combined with it. No one can serve books and mammon."I Can it be that the men who loved books so dearly, were at the same time ignorant men and lovers of ignorance? Impossible. Indeed all the truly learned, however hostile in other respects to the monks, admit that to accuse them of ignorance is to accuse them wrongfully. A living writer observes," the learning of the monastic bodies has been underrated: the ages in which they lived have been called Dark Ages; but they were almost the sole depositories of the learning of the land. They were the historians, the * Mabillon, Etudes Monastiques, part 1. chap. 10. + Digby, Book 10. p. 223, + Ibid. grammarians, the poets: they accumulated magnificent libraries."* But for the monks and the monastic libraries, the works of the Greek and Roman writers, and the very language in which they wrote, would have passed away with the empire of Greece and of Rome. They carefully cleared the fields of ancient literature, and sowed the seeds of that which in modern times days has so luxuriantly grown up. We, their ungrateful posterity, riot and revel in the enjoyment of the rich harvest their industry has prepared for us, and the debt we owe them for so much of mental and so much of manual labour, we discharge by styling them ignorant and idle men. The monks, then, were learned men and patrons of learning: but, notwithstanding modern calumny, they were as good as they were learned. With the exceptions which we have already made, we are not afraid to vouch for the morality of the cloister. It is now admitted by all save the veriest bigots, that when Henry the Eighth suppressed the monasteries in England, no fault could be found with their inmates. These were pious and Godfearing men. "What Burnet hath offered against them," says Hearne, "appears to me to be spite and malice. His proofs are weak and groundless; and I doubt not but that if any monk's character were strictly and impartially examined, there is not one of them but would appear more innocent and more virtuous than any of the visitors, (King Henry's visitors), and it may be than any one of their accusers."t 66 In the preamble of the very act which annihilates the smaller monasteries, observes Lord John Manners, thanks are given to Almighty God that in the greater houses religion is well kept and preserved." Dugdale feelingly laments the unjust and ungenerous prejudices, that, in his time, obtained against the monks of the middle ages. Camden speaks of these men in the highest possible terms of praise and admiration. Southey declares they "well deserved the popularity they enjoyed." Dr. Johnson almost adored them. "I never read of a hermit,' said the sage," but, in imagination, I kiss his feet; never of a monastery, but I fall on my knees and kiss the pavement." The learned Fuller declares, among other * Knight's Life of Shakspeare, p. 184. things, "that their life was constantly spent in prayer, reading, musing, and such like pious employments. "That it would do one good to think of their goodness." Our readers will find in the "Christian Remembrancer" a hundred other testimonies to the virtues and learning of the monks. The very individuals sent by Henry the Eighth, more, as some one justly remarks, to condemn the monks than to inspect the monasteries, could find no fault with these injured men. This they frankly owned themselves, and by doing so, greatly mortified the tyrant king. 66 The virtues of the monks recommended them to the esteem and love of all: both in town and country they were general favourites. An English writer, speaking of the accumulation of lands in the hands of churchmen, says, The nation apprehended that the engaging behaviour of the mendicants would still add to the inconvenience." In fact, one could not help loving these charming men all that can endear a fellow-creature to us, they possessed: they were the most learned men of the day: they were the most refined in language and manners: they excelled in all the arts, in music, in painting, in architecture, in agriculture: their skill in medicine was considerable, and exerted in favour of all, and for nothing. They were the teachers of the people in the pulpit, and a model of virtue to them in the ordinary walks of life. Withal they were so meek, so mild, so affable, so severe to themselves, so tenderly indulgent to the weaknesses and so feelingly alive to the woes of others. Their legends, of which so much ill has been spoken, were often but their familiar instructions to a rude but docile people. Apart from the crowd and in the seclusion of their monasteries, the monks acquired knowledge, subdued their passions, learned the things that are of God. Again, in the haunts of society, in the town and country, in the pulpit, in the confessional, and in the bosom of pious families, they communicated to others the fruits of their hidden labour; they instructed the ignorant, they reconciled enemies, they trained up youth to virtue, they laboured to reclaim the sinner, they visited and redeemed captives, they tended the sick, they encouraged and exhorted the dying, and with prayer and supplication they closed the grave over the Christian dead. Spending almost nothing on themselves, * Digby, ut supra. It they were prodigal to the poor, and their gates were ever open to the pilgrim and the stranger. A cold and phlegmatic disciple of Calvin may accuse them of avarice and of selfishness-he may talk of their not "abounding in charity;"* but all history will testify against him. Guizot, in his Lectures on Modern History, stops more than once to laud the charity of the good and holy monks. The church at all times loved the indigent; her bosom was ever open to receive them; she styled herself the city of the poor-that is, their refuge, their asylum. St. Gregory the Great, himself a monk, and a rich man ere he entered the cloister, distributed his whole patrimony among the poor; his rule was to give to all who sought relief-omni petenti da, said he to his steward. Innocent III., another great pope, who had worn the cowl, like Gregory, was known, in times of public distress, to have fed the famishing crowd to the number of 9,000 persons per day. It is a notorious fact, related by Mabillon, that in one day, in the monastery of Cluny, there was a stipend given to 17,000 poor. cannot escape the most unreflecting that poor laws are of modern date. The law of the Gospel sufficed to make men charitable in days of old-in days when, we are told by modern protestors, that the Gospels were a sealed book; and now when the Gospels are in the hands of every one, albeit they enjoin charity to the poor as one of the chiefest of virtues, the poor would starve if the law of the land did not come to the aid of the gospel, and enforce its sacred precepts. The olden unions of monks and holy men are laughed at and sneered at now-a-days; they have given place to unions of parishes, but, oh! what a wretched change! Our unions of parishes dole out a miserable pittance to the poor, fixed by parliamentary decree; the unions of monks knew neither weight nor measure, they gave all they had, they gave all that was wanted, and to all that wanted. Alas now for the suffering poor! The times of the Gregories and Innocents have passed away; and the Clunys, which could feed in one day 17,000 starving men, have fallen a prey to heretic wrath and Jewish cupidity. We will notice only one more of the many prejudices, * North British Review, on Scottish monks. Digby, Mores Catholici, Book 1. chap. 3. which by evil and interested men, have been excited and industriously kept up among the vulgar against the monks. "The The ignorance and arrogance of both are alike. monastic life was inimical to learning," says the Northern Sage; pray, then, how does it come to pass that the monastic life has produced so many learned men? Let any one read Mabillon's book on "Monastic Studies," or at least the 5th Chap. Part 1st, of that excellent work, and he will soon perceive that the monastic life was all along a life of learning. It gave to the world its greatest lights. St. Bazil the Great, St. John Chrysostom, and St. Gregory Nazianzen, were monks, as were also St. Augustin, St. Jerome, and St. Gregory the Great. In later and less learned times, St. Bernard, St. Anselm, Lanfranc, the Venerable Bede, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas Aquinas, were all monks, and reared in the seclusion of the monastic life. Thousands of other monks from the earliest days of monasticism to the very end of the last century, were ever the first in the very first ranks of the learned. What men were ever more learned than the Bollandists, the Benedictines, and others of the various monastic families? Mabillon himself, a monk of the seventeenth century, was presented to Louis XIV. his sovereign, as the most learned and most modest man in the king's dominions. One single house of the Benedictine order, to which Mabillon belonged, was said by Gibbon to have given to the world a greater number of learned books than both the Universities of England. Some of the most valuable discoveries in the arts and sciences were made within the walls of a monastery: to the monks we owe all that is known of the middle ages, and whatever yet remains of Greek and Roman lore: but for them the Scriptures. themselves would have perished. Our Humes and Robertsons and other popular writers were pilfering from the monastic authors at the very time they were recommending them to public contempt as ignorant and worthless chroniclers. Our very novelists and writers of romance are deeply indebted to them. as may be seen by consulting one of the papers in Washington Irving's SketchBook. 66 Among the monks,"we are told, "the absence of all impulse to intellectual activity......extinguished every spark of original genius." If we may credit St. Augustin, |