until the sixth century, it had little form and method. Then arose Benedict of Nursia, and settled, by his rule, the character of Western monachism for all time. His power lay in interpreting to itself that spirit which was abroad in society, and giving it a wider and freer range. The rule which bears his name simply brought out into clear form and order the ideas which were floating in the powerful and practical minds of the founders of monachism in the West. For both of these they were.

"The great monks bear full comparison with the greatest soldiers, statesmen, and kings. We may lament or condemn the form of life which they elected, and see clearly whitherward it tends. But we must bear in mind that it was for ages the chosen field of action of some of the very strongest, ablest men, and the noblest, purest women whom God sent forth into the world.

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One is tempted to some impatience when our divines and scholars, to whom sitting under their own vine and fig-tree, no man daring to make them afraid,' is the ideal of a social state, speak with lofty superiority of a mode of life which men like Benedict, Severinus, Columba, Columbanus, Bede, the two great Gregories, Boniface, Anselm, and Bernard deliberately elected, and loved with a devotion so passionate that they were ready at every moment to seal their vows with their blood. We speak with compassion of the superstition which drove such good men to bury themselves in a living grave. I can fancy St. Bernard passing with a smile of yet loftier compassion through our city streets, reading our leading journals, visiting our Exchange, looking into our banks and assurance offices, our pauper infirmaries, and our casual wards, or the gold room in New York. Perhaps the superstition which we pity would not be the saddest thing in his sight, fresh from the visions of the celestial world. At least let us be sure that there is nothing which calls mainly for pity in a life which had a strong attraction for some of the ablest and bravest spirits whom the world nursed for ages; and that, however monks might grovel and sin, and make their profession a by-word of scorn through Europe, a high and noble inspiration was at the heart of a movement which occupied such splendid energies, and left such marks on the higher development of mankind. There can be no doubt that the rule included a vast crowd of weak, dreamy fainéant devotees; but, on the other hand, it would be hard to find, in any other sphere of human activity during the Middle Ages, a grander company of clear, strong, firm, and far-sighted men. We are bound to believe in this life as one which had a specific rightness of adaptation in its times, or its secret will remain veiled."

We cannot trace onward Mr. Baldwin Brown's further following out of his thesis. We have thus given a specimen of his matter and style, and must refer the reader to his Essay for the rest. It must suffice to say that what follows is even more important and startling. He vindicates the Benedictines from the stupid taunt of proclivity to choice of luxurious sites, by the proof that it was they who made desert marshes to blossom like the rose. In writing of the establishment of perpetual vows as in inner reality the destruction of selfdenial, he observes that even this did not destroy the virtue and power of the institution, adding, with admirable candour,—

"And it is quite possible that there may be a high use of teaching and influence in an institution, which if allowed to run its whole course would be fatal to society. I suppose that we are most of us doing the world some service by institutions and methods, which, if they had the whole field to themselves, would be fatal to its life. A dark thought sometimes crosses one, as to how things might go, if the whole world were suddenly turned into a huge Independent Church."

Then the process is traced by which the monks, at first simply laymen, became not clerics only, but the elect of the clerical order. And then further, the instructive history, how the monks became the army of the Papal Church.

But Mr. Brown's object is not to sketch out history alone. It is to connect by a philosophical analysis of the causes of this great institution, its working of old with its working now. Whence did all this spring? Was it, as no less a writer than M. Guizot holds, from the idleness, corruption, and unhappiness of society at the time? Did the absolute submission of the monk to his abbot, appearing as it did under the Roman empire, arise out of the worship of the Imperial majesty?

Mr. Brown justly rejects this hypothesis. "The mainspring of all great human movements is attraction and not repulsion." While the wretchedness of life under the decaying empire helped the movement mightily, nothing on this scale and of this force is primarily a refuge. The history of asceticism has never shewn the attraction of the monastic life to be in inverse proportion to the industry, security, and prosperity of the secular life of the times.

"We may live to see a powerful monastic movement, under new forms but with the old spirit, developed out of the intense activity, the restless liberty, and the splendid prosperity of our nineteenth century life."

Beneath all these, at the heart of all these, as the living germ which all these helped to stimulate and develop, we must place the imitation of the Lord Jesus. The conversion of St. Anthony at one end of the scale, that of St. Francis of Assisi at the other, testify how profoundly the idea of this imitation ruled the noblest minds through the monastic ages. In the monk's submission to his abbot, the same is seen.

From this springs, as a corollary, the inference of Mr. Brown, that "the religious" were from the first the distinctly Evangelical element in the Church: meaning by the term, that in religion which lives by vital personal fellowship with the living Christ. He works this idea out with considerable courage, skill, and candour: courage, in vindicating for Evangelicalism its assumed high place as leader of human movement: skill, in bringing out successfully the somewhat startling parallel: and candour, in frankly acknowledging the great damning

faults of modern Evangelicalism, which render it hardly lovely, even when placed by the side of monachism itself.

"And we hold that during the ages in which the conditions of human life and thought made it desperately difficult for men to hold clearly in view the essential truth of the Gospel, the religious,' by the passionate earnestness of their devotion to the Saviour, by their studious imitation of the form of His example, by their vivid preachings, writings, and biographies, did keep some warm though distorted image of Him who is the very core of Christian doctrine, before the world. And again I urge, that the age is coming, nay is already come, which will be as startled at the image of Christ which we have been presenting during the doctrinal era which is closing, as we are at the image which was presented in a monastic life. We judge these men as if the pure form of the truth were ours at last. We shall live to be as ashamed of the impurities which we have mixed with it, as Boniface was of Pope Zachary, Bernard of his friend Eugenius III., Catherine of Siena of Gregory XI., or Luther of what he saw under Julius II. at Rome. We have not yet reached the point which might justify us in judging the monastic life by our standard. If we compare it with the standard of Christ, let us place ourselves beside the monks as we judge them, and own for them and for ourselves a double shame.

"It would be easy to quote from the writings of the great monks down to quite recent times, a series of passages full of intense and passionate devotion to the person of the Saviour; and those at all acquainted with the sermons of modern monastic preachers, will know how deep a strain of Evangelical thought and passion breathes through their words. The question of course arises how far their principle helped or hindered their witness for the living Christ. We can see how much it distorted; we can measure the shame which the inevitable degradation of the Order brought upon his name. But we find something similar in all Churches and Church movements. And when we see a certain tone of thought and feeling conspicuous in the great leaders of a school through successive ages, and tinging the whole current of its life, we are bound to believe that there was something in the principle of the school which fostered it. Nor is it difficult to see how their mode of life and their special abnegations made the living Saviour very real and very dear to them; though the same habit of life might as easily lead men away from Him in these more instructed days. Fearful as were the evils which the monks wrought in Christendom, we cannot question that in the formative ages of its growth this witness to the Lord Jesus left a large balance of blessing to be placed to the account of the 'religious life." "

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The Essay concludes with a rapid and masterly survey of the whole field of the part which the monks played in relation to the Church, the invisible body: their connexion with the inward and outward life of men-the human affections, interests, and duties: and the service which they rendered incidentally to the culture of Christendom and the unfolding of the life of secular society.

The two closing paragraphs are too remarkable to be passed over, and at the same time present a specimen of Mr. Baldwin Brown's best style.

"Two subjects remain for notice-each of them worthy of a treatise,

while on each I can allow myself but a word. They are, the sphere which monachism opened to woman, and the principle and fruits of monastic ministry to the poor. On the first point we may say with truth, that when we have found for woman in the secular sphere, a position and a work which may mate with that which the Middle Ages offered to her in the monastic, we shall have solved successfully one of the most pressing and perplexing problems of modern society. Their work for the poor is open to greater question. In the later monastic ages it was vicious and demoralizing in the extreme. But nothing can be more unjust than to argue from this, that the influence of the large and lavish monastic charity was on the whole baneful, in the ages when misery was abundant through war and tyranny, when pilgrims were many, and when the great monastic ages were the only hostelries and almonries of the poor. They made as much poverty as they cured, is the charge of the economists. Quite possibly. But have we found the juste milieu? The monastery erred grievously on the side of indiscriminate lavishness. The modern system, which has now touched its nadir at St. Pancras-where niggard charity leaves dying paupers to fight with rats, and stifles them with the stench of sewers-does not look beautiful beside the tender courage of St. Francis in a hospital of lepers, or even the gentler ministries of the sisters of St. Vincent de Paul. It is easy, however, to indulge in sharp and bitter remarks on what is confessedly a profoundly difficult and intricate subject. It may be enough to indicate here that the tendency of the best thinking as well as feeling on the subject in England is at present not in the direction of St. Pancras, but in the direction of that personal, intimate, and considerate ministry of Christian intelligence and charity to poverty, which the monks made illustrious throughout the earlier Middle Age.

"In closing this Essay I am, of course, not unmindful of the fearful picture of corruption, of the tales of unutterable abominations and horrors, which I might draw from authentic monastic history. A life of such high tension, kept at full pitch so long, inevitably, when the tension relaxed, sank into dark, sad depths. Great spiritual movements are powerful for a time only; their lees are always noxious, though there is little in history so foul as the lees of the monastic. Very noble, beautiful, heroic, much of it was while the red blood of its youth was in it; very pallid, foul, and base it became when it dragged on a dull mechanical existence after its work in the world was done. But to judge it, I think that we must look at it in its prime; in the light of its aims, aspirations, and hopes. It is the true judgment; it is the key, perhaps, to the merciful judgments of God. It would be easy to show what dragged monachism to the dust; it is more profitable to consider what enabled it, in spite of this constant human proneness to corruption, to regenerate itself so often, and to endure so long.

"On the whole, we must say, to sum up the matter, that nothing in the long run and on a large scale succeeds in God's world but God's law. Extremes on either hand are ultimately fatal. In the beginning God made them male and female,' body and soul, man and the world. All rebellion against his institution is in the end futile and ruinous. The man who stands open all round him to the influences, and bound with the bonds of both worlds-that is, the man who stands in Christ at the point where they are one-is the religious man, and his life alone is the religious life.' To bring forth this man is the great problem of Christian history; and I often think that humanity has to be shaped for it much as a sculptor moulds his clay. Much has to be taken into the first rude shape, which will be paired off and toned down into the harmony of the form as the develop

ment proceeds. Masses have to be added here and there to make an organ or a muscle, which are destined to vanish and yet to leave an invaluable line as a legacy. Were the monastic orders attached thus to the great body of Christian society not to be permanently wrought into it in their integrity, but to leave, as Time pares them away, some clear line, some essential feature, in the living body which shall survive the process, and shall stand up as the complete humanity in the day of the manifestation of the sons of God?"

We have been somewhat careful in analyzing this Essay, because of what seems to us its remarkable power, as to both matter and style. On the latter indeed we might, were we so disposed, play the critic somewhat at length. Full of vigour and beauty, it is also full of faults. One of the most striking is, carelessness, due apparently to haste of composition, in the repetition of words in contiguous clauses. And, with all allowance for the inevitable mannerism of genius, we feel a little repulsion at some of Mr. Brown's pet expressions cropping out at almost every turn. The somewhat Daily Telegraph verb "begem" comes several times: and the adverb "mightily" kept putting in an appearance so often, that at length we took the trouble to count, and found the sum total not indeed what the sated ear had anticipated, but still far too great for even the most ample allowance in the use of an exceptional and sensational word.

To say that this Essay is all we know of Mr. Baldwin Brown's writings, is, we suppose, to illustrate the sentence with which this article opened. But the Essay tempts us, and we hope will tempt our readers, to know more. The man who can thus write must wield no small power over his circle of readers: and from the character of this sample of his work, we can have no doubt in what direction and with what effect, that power is used. We are not aware of any Anglican writer quite to be named in competition with him.

IV.

Mr. Eustace Conder's lucid essay on Church and State seems to us to labour under the imperfection which affects almost all other Essays written in the same sense.

Up to a certain point, the logic of their argument is perfect in its agreement with the conditions under which our practice must be conducted. Let us explain. Mr. Conder, after laying down what we in common with him hold to be the undeniable principles of the mutual relations of Church and State, then proceeds to answer the question, whether the State is to be regarded as entirely irreligious? And this he answers, by representing that in the ultimate state of things which he contemplates, all bodies and individuals in the State would be actuated by the common principles of Christianity, and consequently the acts of the State which was made up of those bodies would of necessity be themselves Christian.