The hope of the
world lies in the further development and completer realization of those
great principles of human freedom that distinguish this century from the
past. The history of monasticism clearly shows that the monasteries
could not minister to that development of liberty, truth and justice,
which constitute the indispensable condition of human happiness and
human progress. Unable to adjust themselves to the new age, unwilling to
welcome the new light, rejecting the doctrine of individual freedom, the
monks were forced to retire from the field.
So fell in England that institution which, for twelve centuries, had
exercised marvelous dominion over the spiritual and temporal interests
of the continent, and for eight hundred years had suffered or thrived on
English soil. "The day came, and that a drear winter day, when its last
mass was sung, its last censer waved, its last congregation bent in rapt
and lovely adoration before the altar." Its majestic and solemn ruins
proclaim its departed grandeur. Its deeds of mercy, its conflicts with
kings and bishops, its prayers and chants and penances, its virtues and
its vices, its trials and its victories, its wealth and its poverty, all
are gone. Silence and death keep united watch over cloister and tomb. We
should be ungrateful if we forgot its blessings; we should be untrue if,
ignoring its evils, we sought to bring back to life that which God has
laid in the sepulcher of the dead.
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