probably be conceded that those who, in order to enrich their own families, felt themselves free to cast to the winds the bonds which had been sufficient to maintain all preceding generations in the observance of the law of sacred property, must have been graduates not principiants in vice, and men whose verdict rather yields presumptive evidence in favour of any cause that they combine to attack or vilify. Their borrowed bravery was not suiting fair constructions. An evil signature was upon them, and it will last. True they seemed, by the force of new opinions, to have a conscience that approved of every thing. All men are philosophers to their inches; there were within them able philosophers in turning the times to their own profit. They called Heaven to witness that they only scorned man's usurpation, and put a period to the crafty impositions of subtle clerks; but here is enough to make us suspect that, could you see the fountain that sent forth so many cozening streams, you would say that Styx were crystal to it. One who knew them said, "To quarrel with church pictures, to come to church to show your new clothes and trinkets, and find fault with the Apostles for having worn such raiment-these are your virtues, your high and holiday devotions! What moral vices follow in the week is best known to your dark close friend that keeps the catalogue." Ay, truly they would make a wiser world, and an age that would beget new annals; but when their lives were written, these sons of pleasure equalled with Nero and Caligula; they were such instruments as wicked tyrants seek-men that mock divinity, that break each precept, both of God and man, and nature too, and do it without lust, but merely because it is a law and good, and persevere till he that taught them to deceive and cozen take them to his mercy. The Pythian oracle was to this effect: "The Pelasgium is better unoccupied *.” So it might have been affirmed of the desecrated monastery. But with a simple belief in Providence the consequences, as related by such writers as Spelman, could surprise no one; for if ever there was a cold, unnatural, and shameless violation of the reverence which lurks at the bottom of the heart generally even of the most flagitious criminals, it was effected by these spoliators. For their conduct throughout the history of mankind has no parallels. "Antony robbed a house by what was thought consecrating it, by erecting an altar, by dedicating a statue; but these men rob houses by avowedly desecrating them, by throwing down altars, by profaning images, by doing 'omnia contra leges moremque_majorum, temere, turbulente, per vim, per furorem +."" The Roman generals, when they took cities, could boast of having appropriated neither pictures nor statues * Thucyd. ii. + Cicero, pro Domo sua. for the adornment of their own houses. Cicero dwells long upon this theme. "What," he demands, "shall I say of Marcellus, who took Syracuse, that most adorned city? What of L. Scipio, who waged war in Asia and conquered Antiochus? What of Flamininus, who subdued Philip of Macedon? What of L. Paulus, who overcame the Persian king? What of L. Mummius, who took that most beautiful and ornate Corinth, full of all things, as also many cities of Achaia and Bœotia?— quorum domus, quum honore et virtute florerent, signis et tabulis pictis erant vacuæ *." Not so the houses of those who included monasteries among the objects of their hostility. These became suddenly enriched with the glorious works of genius which their authors had consecrated to God, and offered frequently in token of personal gratitude to those asylums where they had found consolation. When Theodosius had destroyed the pagan temples, to show how little avarice entered into the motives which led to that measure, he ordered that all the money coming from it should be given to the poor. These reformers, or rather founders of what they declared to be the true religion, on the contrary, who turned into coin every thing that was capable of such transmutation, put the produce very coolly into their own pockets. Mischief, in fact, was their occupation, and to mean well to no man their chiefest harvest. But let us throw a last glance upon the ruins which attest the passage of such enemies, and which move so many now to lamentations, as where the poet says, "He ceased, and to the cloister's pensive scene shaped his solitary way." The apologist for these institutions has often favourable hearers, to whom he can say with Cicero, "Satis multa hominibus non iniquis hæc esse debent; nimis etiam multa vobis, quos æquissimos esse confidimust." The lover of such ruins, it is true, when wishing to behold some trace of life amongst them, is driven to strange resources, as where the poet lately cited adds, "Survey these walls, in fady texture clad, Where wand'ring snails in many a slimy path, Free, unconstrain'd, their various journeys crawl; Tracing the snail thus will not, however, satisfy all observers. An intelligent traveller in Spain is not contented, even though he find the buildings still without decay, as when the monks were first driven from them; for speaking of the Escurial, he says, "Now that the cloisters and courts are untenanted, these Pro C. Rabirio. * In Ver. act. ii. lib. i. long passages seem to lead to nothing; and we miss the monk, fit inmate of the granite pile, stealing along as he was wont with noiseless tread and Zurbaran look." Nor can the well-kept grounds that indicate the rich proprietor, where once the monastery stood in wild and natural beauty, appear to all observers a sufficient substitute. "I went," says an ingenious writer, “to stay at a very grand and beautiful place in the country, where the grounds are said to be laid out with consummate taste. For the first three or four days I was perfectly enchanted; it seemed something so much better than nature, that I really began to wish the earth had been laid out according to the latest principles of improvement, and that the whole face of nature wore a little more the appearance of a park. In three days' time I was tired to death; a thistle, a nettle, a heap of dead bushes, any thing that wore the appearance of accident and want of attention, was quite a relief. I used to escape from the made grounds, and walk upon an adjacent goose-common, Overgrown with fern, and rough With prickly gorse, that shapeless and deform'd, The cart-ruts, gravel-pits, irregularities, and all the varieties produced by neglect, were a thousand times more gratifying than the monotony of beauties, the result of design, and crowded into narrow confines with a luxuriance and abundance utterly unknown to nature." Still less can the interior refinement, the collections, and luxuries of the secular house offer adequate compensation for what is gone. Goethe, describing his visit to a monastery in Sicily, after having been to a certain rich man's villa on the preceding day, says, "We drove home with very different feelings from what we did yesterday. To-day we had to regret a noble institution which was falling with time; while, on the other hand, a most tasteless undertaking had a constant supply of wealth for its support." Without leaving our own shores the same impressions are experienced by many; for ""Tis not high power that makes a place divine, "Adieu, monasteries!" cries an illustrious pilgrim, whose words, I am convinced, will never make a very serious impression upon the minds of many manufacturers and gentlemen of large landed property-" adieu, monasteries! at which I have thrown a glance in the valleys of the Sierra-Nevada and on the shores of Murcia. There at the sound of a bell, which will shortly sound no more, under falling cascades, amidst lauras without anachorites, sepulchres without voices, the dead without a remembrance-there in empty refectories, in meadows waste, where Bruno left his silence, Francis his sandals, Dominick his torch, Charles his crown, Ignatius his sword, Rance his hair-cloth, one grows accustomed to despise time and life; and if the reverie of passions should return, this solitude will lend them something which agrees well with the vanity of a dream." While lamenting their fall, however, those who may be still attached to these institutions would not leave the present generation of their enemies hopeless or discouraged; they would find an excuse for their prejudices, they would think kindly of them, and furnish an instance of the resemblance between the sandal-tree imparting while it falls its aromatic flavour to the edge of the axe and the benevolent man who returns good for evil. There remains, therefore, the signal on this road formed by observing the impressions that central principles leave on the mind when contrasting the past with the present, and looking forward to the future destinies of the human race. Some, perhaps, who have pursued this road so far with us have been discouraged and repelled from proceeding through the direct and natural issues which it has yielded to the centre by three considerations, which they think ought to lead them in a contrary sense; for they cling to those doubts which are grounded on the existence of abuses, on the need of reform, and even on the necessity of change. No doubt many have thought that these last, as well as all former avenues, were blocked up and impassable to Catholicism, by meeting obstructions which only existed in their own imagination, misinformed and misdirected by guides more ignorant perhaps than they were themselves; they strike at useless shrubs that hinder not their prospect; or rather the briers and underwood are of their own creation; but their best friends would exclaim with Isabella, in the old tragedy "Down with these branches and these loathsome boughs; Here the way will be cleared, so as to leave them without at least such difficulties, when we proceed to observe that Catho licism recognizes these facts as fully as they can do, and even accepts and sanctions in substance the conclusions at which they themselves arrive. The It is remarkable that no men describe with more minuteness, and condemn with more fervour, the abuses that have often crept into monastic life, than those who have themselves embraced that state. Dionysius the Carthusian was so impressed with a horror of abuses, that he says, "Probably the devil appeared to our Lord in the form of a religious man, like a monk or hermit, as we should now call him." In a certain hall of the monastery of St. Hubert, the demon is painted in the habit of a Carmelite. The monastic world, in fact, in the judgment of its own historians, resembles Athens in the character ascribed to it by Plutarch, as having produced the best honey and the best poison, the most just and the most wicked of men. Church, without subscribing to all the passionate declamation of rigorists, seems to have had but one voice to condemn the real abuses of monachism, and to deplore the manifold evils that result from the wishes and conduct of such men as St. Gregory the Great and St. Bernard describe, seeking, under a religious habit, to change but not to leave vices-" mutare sæculum non relinquere." Where are there not abuses? Catholicity on every road will show thee heaven; but if thou miss the path it guides thee in, thou wilt enforce it to share thy ruin, and pervert the ends of its eternity; which, if thou tread by its directions, it communicates and makes thee like itself. So it is in this particular state of life, which, with great candour, a Protestant author has lately defended against the charge of hypocrisy, when the failings of those who embrace it are proved. Whole orders, as well as individual members, have degenerated; and it is not Catholicism which inspires any one with a wish to conceal the fact. It is within the sanctuary itself that one hears complaints corresponding to what Dante heard in Paradise, as where we read, "His family, that wont to trace his path, Turn backward, and invert their steps; ere long The Abbé de Rance, always extreme perhaps in his judgment, maintains that the whole history of the religious orders presents a series of moral revolutions, or periods of perfection, succeeded by periods of what he considered degeneracy. "St. Pachomius," he observes, "predicted the ruin of Tabenne, which * 12. |