not the less an admitted customary or common law, a perpetual silent control on the arbitrary power of the individual priest, a guarantee as it were to the penitent, that if he faithfully submitted to the appointed discipline, he could not be denied the inappreciable absolution. The Penitentials thus, by regulating the sacerdotal power, confirmed it; that which might have seemed a hard capricious exaction became a privilege; the mercies of the law were indissolubly bound up with its terrors. However severe, monastic, unchristian, as enjoining self-torture; degrading to human nature, as substituting ceremonial observance for the spirit of religion; debasing instead of wisely humiliating; and resting in outward forms which might be counted and calculated, so many hours of fasting, so many blows of the scourge, so many prayers, so many pious ejaculations, for each offence-yet as enforcing, it might be, a rude and harsh discipline, it was still a moral and religious discipline. It may have been a low, timid, dependent virtue to which it compelled the believer, yet still virtue. It was a perpetual proclamation of the holiness and mercy of the Gospel. It was a constant preaching, on one hand, it might be of an unenlightened, superstitious Christianity, but still of Christianity. Yet, on the other hand, it was a recognition of a divine law, submission to a religion which might not be defied, which would not be eluded-a religion which would not deny its hopes to the worst, but would have at least resolutions, promises of amendment-the best security which it could obtain from the unreasoning and fallible nature of man. It aspired at least to effect that which no human law could do, which baffled alike imperial and barbaric legislation, to impose constraint on the unchristian passions and dispositions. When sacerdotal religion was, if not necessary, salutary at least to mankind, it was the great instrument by which the priesthood ruled the mind of man. If it increased the wealth of the clergy, it was wealth much of which lawless possessors, spoilers, robbers, had been forced to regorge. If it invested them with an authority as dangerous to themselves as to the world, that authority was better than moral anarchy. How

ever administered, it was still law, and Christian law, grounded on the eternal principles of justice, humanity, and truth.k

It will hereafter appear in our History how the penitential system degenerated into commutations for penance by alms (alms being only part of the penance, compensated for prayer), fasting, and other religious observances; alms regulated indeed by the rank and wealth of the transgressor, but with full expia

tory value; commutations became indulgencies; indulgencies, first the remission of certain penitential acts, then general remissions of sins for definite periods, at length for periods almost approximating to eternity; and these for the easiest of religious duties, visits to a certain church, above all ample donations.

CHAPTER VI.

WESTERN MONASTICISM.

MONASTICISM ascended the papal throne in the person of Gregory the Great. As our history approaches Western this marked period in the annals of Latin Chris- monasticism tianity, it is necessary to describe the rise and progress of those institutions, which at once tended so powerfully to propagate, to maintain, and to give its peculiar character to the Christianity of Western Christendom.

Western monasticism was very different from that of the East. It was practical more than speculative; it looked more to the performance of rigid duty, the observance of an austere ritual, the alternation of severe toil with the recitation of certain stated offices, or the reading appointed portions of sacred books, than to dreamy indolence and meditative silence, only broken by the discussion of controverted points of theology. Labour was part of the rule of all the eastern monks; it

contrasted

was urged by the wiser advocates of the monastic with Eastern. state, Athanasius, Basil, Chrysostom, even Jerome: it was enforced in the law of the monastic life brought by Cassianus from the East; and it is singular that it was first repudiated by Martin of Tours and his disciples;" yet the eastern element predominated over the rule almost throughout Greek Christianity. The Greek monks have done little or nothing to advance the cultivation of barren lands, for the arts, for knowledge, or for civilisation. But the hermits in the West were in general content

a "A labouring monk is troubled by one devil, an idle one by a host of devils." --Cassian, x. 23. Augustine wrote a book, de Opere Monachorum. M. Villemain has this striking observation: "De cette rude école du désert il sortait des grands hommes et des fous."--Mélanges,

VOL. I.

Eloquence Chrétienne, p. 356. The East had few great men, many madmen; the West, madmen enough, but still very many great men.

b Paulin de vit. Martini, 1. ii. Sulpic. Severus, c. 7.

2 E

with the wild recesses of nature, and with a rigid but secret discipline. They had neither the ingenious nor the ostentatious self-tortures which were common in the East. They had no Stylites, men who stood for decades of years on a lofty pillar, a pillar elevated in height as the saint drew nearer to heaven and to perfection as yet no rambling and vagabond monks, astonishing mankind by the public display of their miserable self-inflicted sufferings. Nor did Coenobites disturb the peace of the western cities by crowding with arms in their hands, ready with unscrupulous and sanguinary fanaticism for slaughter, or worse than slaughter, in the maintenance of some favourite doctrine, or some favourite prelate. Under their founder in Northern France, Martin of Tours, they might lend their tumultuous aid in the demolition of some heathen shrine or temple; but their habits were usually those of profound peace; they aspired not yet to rule the world which they had forsworn: it was not till much later that their abbots, now endowed with enormous wealth, poured upon them by blind admiration of their holiness, assumed political existence. The western monks partook of that comparative disinclination to the more subtle religious controversy which distinguished Roman from Greek and Oriental Christendom. Excepting the school of semi-Pelagianism, propagated by the Oriental Cassianus among the monasteries in the neighbourhood of Marseilles. (still to a certain extent a Greek city, and with the Greek language spoken around it), the monasteries were the seats of submissive, uninquiring orthodoxy. The monasteries were not as yet the asyla of letters. Both the ancient Latin prose and ancient Latin poetry were too repulsively and dangerously heathen to be admitted into the narrow cell or the mountain cloister. This dangerous tendency to intellectual indulgence which followed Jerome into his cave in Palestine, and could only be allayed by the scourge and unintermitting fast, as yet did not penetrate into the solitudes of the western recluses. But if the

Fifty-six, according to Evagrius, t. iii. i. 13; Theodoret. Hist. Relig., p.

882.

"The Gallic bishops ordered a pil

lar to be destroyed on which an ambitious Western aspired to rival the East."Greg. Tur. i. 17. Compare Schroeck, viii. p. 231.

reason was suppressed with such unmitigated proscription, the imagination, while it shrunk from those metaphysic abstractions, which are so congenial to eastern mysticism, had full scope in the ordinary occurrences of life, which it transmuted into perpetual miracle. The mind was centered on itself; its sole occupation was the watching the emotions, the pulsations of the religious life; it impersonated its impulses, it attributed to external or to foreign but in-dwelling powers the whole strife within. Everything fostered, even the daily labour, which might have checked, carried on in solitude and in silence, encouraged the vague and desultory dreaminess of the fancy. Men plunged into the desert alone, or united themselves with others (for there is no contagion so irresistible as that of religious emotion) under a deep conviction that there was a fierce contest taking place for the soul of each individual, not between moral influences and unseen and spiritual agencies, but between beings palpable, material, or at least having at their command material agents, and constantly controlling the course of nature. All the monks' scanty reading was of the miracles of our Lord or his Apostles, or still more the legends of saints. Their singing was of the same subjects. Their fasts were to expel demoniacal possessions, their festivals to celebrate the actual presence of the tutelar saint. And directly the soul escaped, as it could not but escape, from the narrow internal world, it carried into the world without, not merely that awful reverence which sees God in everything, but a wondering ignorance of nature and of man, which made miracle the ordinary rather than the exceptional state of things. The scenes among which they settled were usually such as would promote this tendency-strange, desolate, gloomy, fearful, the interminable sea or desert, the mountain immeasurable by the eye, the unfathomed glen; in Italy volcanic regions, either cleft or distorted by ancient eruptions, and still liable to earthquake and disorder. Their solitudes ceased to be solitary; they were peopled with sounds, with apparitions unaccountable and therefore supernatural. Wherever a few met together, they met upon the principle of encouraging each other, of vying with each other,