CHAPTER IXCONCLUDING WORDS
ALTOGETHER apart from the outrageously scandalous way in which the suppression of the English monasteries was carried out—a fact that any historian worth his salt is now bound to admit—it is a wholesome sign of the times to find that English Churchmen are gradually coming round to a general acceptance of the religious and social blessings that came to this country through monasticism during the many centuries in which it played so important a part in the national life. This is certainly the estimate formed by those amongst us who study the history of the vowed religious life with sober devoutness. There are few churchmen of the immediate past whose judgments can be followed with more implicit trust than the late Dean of St. Paul’s; and there are none among our living churchmen, who, from patient research, are more capable of uttering a reliable opinion on monasticism than the present Dean of Durham.
Dr. Church penned a beautiful and comprehensive chapter on the discipline of a Norman monastery in hisLife of St. Anselm. From it we borrow a single paragraph:
“In an age when there was so much lawlessness, and when the idea of self-control was so uncommon in the ordinary life of man, the monasteries were schools of discipline; and there were no others. They upheld and exhibited the great, then almost the original, idea, that men needed to rule and govern themselves; that they could do it, and that no use of life was noble and perfect without this ruling. It was hard and rough discipline, like the times, which were hard and rough. But they did good work then, and for future times, by impressing on society the idea of self-control and self-maintained discipline. And crude as they were, they were capable of nurturing noble natures, single hearts, keen and powerful intellects, glowing and unselfish affections.”
Dean Kitchin, when commenting on the division of administration among the obedientiaries or office-holding monks of St. Swithun’s, writes:
“It must never be forgotten that this organisation of offices within the convent was useful in its best days. Where in the whole world of the thirteenth century can we meet with so completely framed and active a system as that of a Benedictine House? Not, certainly, in the feudal castle, with its fierce warrior-lord and turbulent horde of ‘devils, not men,’ as the English Chronicle calls them; notin the mediæval city, with powers and privileges still uncertain and precarious, though there was here, perhaps, a nearer parallel than elsewhere; not even in King’s courts, which came and went, and had not yet developed their completechancellerie, nor had learnt the importance of ministers and departments of administration. In a well-ordered monastery, with its eighteen or twenty obedientiaries, life went on smoothly and prosperously. There only were the divisions of time fully understood, and the importance of time appreciated; there only were the departments of work, the directions of industry, carefully marked out; there too the main principle of official responsibility began early to be asserted.”
As to “the stories of corruption and immorality on which sinful minds have ever fastened greedily,” writes the Dean in another place, “they have attracted far more than a fair amount of notice and attention, and have given the excuse for those interested and truthless persons, who, in the Reformation time and in later days too, have thought to honour God by blackening wholesale the monastic character.Deo per mendacium gratificariis still far too often the guiding line of many a polemic, who tries to win his battle by flinging dirt in the faces of his opponents.... In these respects the brethren at St. Swithun’s may look the world in the face without fear.”
It is not within the province of an English Churchman to deal with the maintenance of monasticismon our shores by those of the Roman obedience, save to say that its flickering stealthy flame survived continuously in glimmers of light in spite of bitter and now obsolete statutes; and further to note that the oppressive action that drove large numbers of “religious” men and women from France to England a century ago has been renewed in recent days. Those most competent to judge have no hesitation in believing that the various orders of religious men and women of the Roman communion in this country are doing an inestimable service—educational, charitable, and spiritual—to those of their own faith. Our best literary critics recognise too the genuine work that not a few are doing in elucidating history, and in other ways adding to the general sum of human knowledge; whilst all Englishmen can well afford to be proud of the attainments and researches of Dr. Gasquet, the abbot-president of the English Benedictines.
With regard to the marvellous growth of community life in the Church of England during the past half-century, it is only necessary to consult the pages of theOfficial Year Book. In the issue for 1904, seven closely-printed pages are occupied with terse accounts of the houses and work of Sisterhoods living under the vowed life, whose members are the very salt of the Church in their devotion to the religious life and to the discharge of corporal works of mercy.
As to Brotherhoods, the growth has beensteady; whilst certain rash attempts to establish communities of men have had but an ephemeral existence, others (notably the Cowley Fathers, the Order of the Resurrection at Mirfield, and the Society of the Sacred Mission) are doing a noble and apparently an abiding work.
Explicit
J. PALMER, PRINTER, CAMBRIDGE.