CHAPTER IV THE RELIGIOUS LIFE "And Jesus answered and said, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel's, but he shall receive an hundred fold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life." ST. MARK X. 29-30. TH - HE religious life is sure to raise up many adversaries. The unbelieving, the carnal minded and unspiritual, cannot understand it. It is of God, and their minds are closed to the Divine Light. It is like the Cross, "a stumbling-block to the worldly, and foolishness to the age." It arouses their hatred because it so testifies against their own views of life. The sensualist Byron wrote that the monks were men who "In hope to merit heaven, Were making earth a hell." And so in hatred, rather than pity, many look down upon these Christian athletes and soldiers of the Cross. The popular self-government of the monastery laid the foundation of the European democracy. But it has been, singularly, accused of being dangerous to society because it cultivated obedience to rule. It has been admitted that they were seats of learning and preserved, through the Middle Ages, the seeds of it. "The fretfulness, impatience, and extreme tension of modern literary life," says Lecky, "the many anxieties that paralyze, and the feverish craving for place that perverts so many noble intellects, were unknown to the monks." The monkish scholar pursued his studies in a spirit which has now almost faded away from the world. It is another popular argument that the monastic system, and by that is meant the religious life, has done its work and is not suited to our age. This overlooks the pregnant fact that the religious life has adapted itself in different forms, from the earliest times, to the wants of society. It first manifested itself in a hermit form, when the saints went out and peopled the Theban desert. They went into the wilderness like their Master, because there they believed they would most successfully wrestle with the evil one. St. Benedict gathered up the scattered hermits into community life, and founded at Monte Cassino the marvellous order that endures even to this day. When the need came for missionary work, St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic founded their respective orders of friars, who went about, as did our early Methodist circuit riders, preaching the Gospel. When there came the upheaval of the Reformation there arose military organizations, chief of which was the Jesuits, under the direction of Loyola. These were not monks, they kept not the recitation of the divine office in common; they wore no distinctive garb; they gave themselves especially to education. And along with this movement St. Vincent de Paul took the nun out of her cell and made her a Sister of Charity, and St. Francis of Sales instituted the Order of the Visitation, dedicated to the work of the education of women. If ever there was an age that needed the witness of the religious life and its dedication to philanthropic work, it is ours. As Cardinal Newman once said: "The quasi heathen of large towns may not be converted by the sight of domestic virtues and domestic comforts in the missionary, but the evident sight of disinterested and self-denying love, and a life of firmness, will influence and rule them." This has been proved by the lives and work in England of such men as Mackonochie, Lowder, and many others, and by the affections which the Sisters show in their enduring ministrations among the sick and needy, and in the lowest regions of crime and misery. Again, the abuses and corruptions which in these twenty centuries may be found connected with the life are greedily pointed out, forgetful of the continual presence of the spirit of reform and revival that has ever marked the life. Surely, the argument of abuse is of no force against us. The Bible and Christianity - indeed there is no human institution that has not suffered from abuse. Corruptio optimi pessima. "The innate principle of monasticism," writes |