We earnestly trust that such incumbents are rare exceptions at such a juncture, when the enemy is at the gates, and when all good men and true are either upon their feet, in mortal combat, or-upon their knees!

The following works have come to hand too late to be noticed in this number:- "History of Israel to the Death of Moses," by Oswald; "Parting Counsels," by Rev. John Allen; "Thoughts on Reading the Bible," by Homo; "Life of Pastor Fleidner;"Coming Events and Present Duties," by the Rev. J. C. Ryle; "The Work of God in Every Age," by the Rev. W. Frogget; "Short Family Readings for Sundays;' ""Pastoral Counsels," by the late Dr Robertson of Glasgow; "The Holy Child, and other Poems," by Stephen Jenner; "Joel, a Translation in Metrical Parallelism," by Adam Clarke Rowley; "Truths for the Times," &c., &c.

Owing to the extreme length of some of the Communications in the present Number, we have been reluctantly compelled to delay the insertion of several Articles and Notices till next Number.

BRITISH AND FOREIGN

EVANGELICAL REVIEW.

JULY 1868.

ART. I.-Montalembert on St Columba.

The Monks of the West, from St Benedict to St Bernard. By the COUNT DE MONTALEMBERT, Member of the French Academy. Vols. i.-v. Edinburgh. 1861-7.

BEFORE

EFORE the eyes of Europe the Count de Montalembert occupies a position peculiarly his own. He is known as a French gentleman, who cherishes ardent sympathies with political liberty and progress, and who accepts without reserve, and without regret, that social condition produced by the French Revolution, "which under the name of democracy reigns, and," as he thinks, "will reign more and more in the modern world" while, at the same time, he avows and proclaims the infallible authority of that church, which, through its head and representative, Pius IX., denounces the political progress of the age as essentially anarchical, revolutionary, infidel, and as opposed to all its dearest interests and projects. The position is indeed peculiar. A single individual may have dexterity enough to balance himself upon that dizzy ridge for a time, but the multitude could not keep their footing upon it for a moment; they must slide down upon the one side or the other, and find themselves landed in the end, either among the friends of civil freedom or the partisans of religious despotism. To serve two masters who issue contradictory orders, and to please them both, is no easy task; yet it does not seem much more difficult than for a man to fuse down into consistency in his intellectual creed the two opposing principles represented by Garibaldi and the Pope.

VOL. XVII.—NO. LXV.

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In his great work entitled The Monks of the West, and of which five volumes, in the authorised English translation, are now before us, the Count claims a hearing from the present generation on the subject of monasticism. He is especially enamoured of that department of the church system with which he is connected, and his book is avowedly written to vindicate the glory of what he calls "one of the greatest institutions of Christianity." From an age which claims to be more dispassionate and unprejudiced than any which has gone before it, he asks to be heard, while he reminds it of the services which these much despised monks have rendered to the cause of truth and freedom, and shews what Christianity and the world have lost by the overthrow of a system, upon which, always first, the spoiler, whether despot or demagogue, is sure to lay a heavy hand, the first moment he can do it safely. The request is reasonable enough. An able man who has something to say upon an important subject, which has given direction to the thoughts and studies of a large portion of his life, is entitled to he heard with respectful attention, however difficult we find it to sympathise in his feelings or to agree with the conclusions. at which he has arrived.

When we survey the monasticism which existed in the church from the fourth century till the Reformation, we freely admit, that, in the circumstances in which the world then found itself placed, it was far from being an unmitigated evil. In its origin, at least, it was a great human effort to remedy the moral disorder by which mankind in all ages are infected. When children raise a ladder upon the hill-top, with the design that upon it they may climb upwards, and thus draw nearer to God, we cannot make light of their motives even though we should smile at their plans; and so, every attempt of man to eradicate the selfishness of his nature, to turn back the tide of the world's corruption, and to elevate himself in the scale of morality, is so far praiseworthy, even though we have no faith that this is to be done by men and women entering voluntarily into a prison, shutting themselves up, and barring the world out. In the darkest of the ages, souls truly pious, there can be no doubt, often withdrew to such places that they might without distraction prepare for another world. In times of lawless force and bloodshed, every one knows that the monastery was an asylum, where weak and timorous spirits, ill able to cope with the rude society in which they found themselves, could retire for shelter and safety. The old monks in their earliest and best days, before their indolence was fostered by wealth and luxury, were often the only examples of peaceful industry in a district, and taught their less skilful neighbours how to till the earth, and draw from the reluctant soil a more generous

return for their labour. In their lonely cells they often spent their leisure in copying valuable manuscripts, and producing original works, which, though seldom rising to the rank of classics, have preserved many valuable facts, and are true photographs of the bright and the dark, the comely and ungainly features of their times. Perhaps it is not too much to say, that under the deluge of barbarism that overflowed the civilisation of Christendom in the early medieval ages, the Scriptures and the classics must have perished had it not been that they were deposited in those monastic edifices, for which the wildest pagans, in many instances, entertained a superstitious respect. Moreover, in cases without number, the monastery was a missionary training school, planted within the limits of some heathen land, from which the monks went forth courageously and devotedly to propagate the religion of the age, such as it was, in the surrounding districts-to be the pioneers of civilisation and the advance-guard of Christianity among a rude and idolatrous population. In old feudal times, when the strong were so ready to domineer over the weak, and society had so little thought of providing for the unfortunate, in the monastery, spirits bruised and bleeding found advice, the sick found medicine, the hungry poor found bread, and the benighted and storm-stayed traveller, entertainment and rest. It would be uncandid not to admit, with very little exception indeed, the statement of the Count, that the monasteries "were for ten centuries and more, the schools, the archives, the libraries, the hostelries, the studios, the penitentiaries, and the hospitals of Christian society."*

But while acknowledging the great services which the monks have rendered to the world in the medieval period, there is another view of the case to which we cannot close our eyes. Monasticism, instead of being "one of the greatest institutions of Christianity," has no claim whatever to be divine in its origin; Christ and his apostles were not monks, neither did they enjoin upon their followers to renounce the society of their kind, and immure themselves in the solitude of the cloister. On the contrary, the leaven was to be put into the meal; the true religion was to come into contact with humanity and strive to gain, to direct, to improve it. Asceticism is a mere human attempt to perform upon human nature a work, which the gospel has made ample provision for performing in a much more effective way. Grant that the cloister has often sheltered the helpless and unfortunate; it has often sheltered, too, the ignorant, the superstitious, the criminal, the polluted, the despot, and the knave. Brigands have been known to use

their tools.

abbeys as the storehouse of their plunder; and kings have used their rich revenues for pensioning their mistresses, supporting their bastards, and rewarding the most unscrupulous of The education received in the cloisters was essentially of a narrow kind, dwarfing the intellect and robbing it of that expansiveness and freedom essential to high culture and to real progress. If they opened their door to the feeble and innocent in days of oppression and danger, it cannot be pretended that there is the same need for them now, when law and order are established, when society provides ample means for alleviating every want and woe that it is possible to relieve, when the printing press has given a perpetuity to literature which neither Goth nor Vandal can destroy, and when the claims of the poor and the defenceless meet with favourable consideration from every government in Christendom. Monasticism seems even to have lost its power of propagating Christianity in any type; there is no instance since the Reformation of any pagan nation being Christianised by monks. For all these reasons we do not feel justified in dissenting from the general opinion, which is, that however serviceable the monastery may have been as an institution in the mediæval ages, preserving, as in an ark, the treasures of religion and learning from the waves of barbarism, which in rapid succession broke over Europe, it has lost to a great extent its beneficial power, and in the present state of society has no peculiar functions of a useful nature to discharge; and that the truly good of both sexes would better serve the end of their being by mixing iu society, and trying to improve it, than by turning monks and nuns, and looking out on the world from behind the bars of the prison, within which they have with their own consent submitted to be encaged.

These views are not by any means peculiar to Protestants; they are steadily making way among Roman Catholics themselves, among whom monasticism is not in such repute as it once was. In all countries which three centuries ago declared for Protestantism in any of its forms, the Reformation gave a deadly blow to the system; the growth of modern civilisation is silently and surely completing its overthrow in the Catholic nations at the present hour. To some of our readers, the information given by the Count in the introduction to his work will probably be new. The work of spoliation, he states, which commenced at the Reformation, is "proceeding with methodical gravity." In the five years from 1830 till 1835, no less than "three thousand monasteries have disappeared from the soil of Europe." In Portugal alone three hundred were destroyed, two hundred in Poland, and the number annihilated by Queen Christina in Spain has not been estimated.