Malmesbury, King Alfred, Alcuin, in England, and
many continental writers, sorrowfully testified against the monks
because of their vices, their revelings, their vain and gorgeous
ornaments of dress and their waning zeal for virtue. The priests hunted
and fought, prayed, preached, swore and drank as they pleased. "We
cannot wonder," says an anonymous historian, "that they should commit
the more reasonable offence of taking wives." Disorders were common
everywhere; the monastic vows were sadly neglected. Political and
religious ideals were lost sight of amid the prevailing confusion and
wild commotion of those dark days. "It is true," says Carlyle, "all
things have two faces, a light one and a dark. It is true in three
centuries much imperfection accumulates; many an ideal, monastic or
otherwise, shooting forth into practice as it can, grows to a strange
reality; and we have to ask with amazement, Is this your ideal? For alas
the ideal has to grow into the real, and to seek out its bed and board
there, often in a sorry way."
This, then, may be accepted as the usual history of a monastery or a
monastic order. First, vows of poverty, obedience and chastity zealously
cherished and observed; as a result of loyalty to this ideal, a spirit
of devotion to righteousness is created, and a pure, lofty type of
Christian life is formed, which, if not the highest and truest, is
sufficiently exalted to win the reverence of worldly men and an
extra-ordinary power over their lives and affections.
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