DIFFERENT ages have had their different ways of attempting to carry out the idea of a religious life. The aim of such a life, in those who have been true in their pursuit of it, has always been the same,—to know God and His will, to learn to be like Him and to love Him; to understand and realize that law of life of which our Lord is the example; to shake off

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ANSELM OF AOSTA.

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the yoke of evil, to face temptation and overcome it, and to rise out of it to that service which is perfect freedom. But though the general principles and motives have been the same, the rules and ordering of life have been various. Social conditions, and the level of cultivation and knowledge, have gone through numberless changes; men have found by experience that what was reasonable in one age alters by the 'alteration of circumstances into what is unwise and mischievous in another; and that which was inconceivable and impossible in an earlier time turns into the natural course of life in a later one. In the eleventh century, as in those immediately before and after it, the natural form of religious life-that which of itself presented itself to the thoughts of a man in earnest, wishing not only to do right, but to do the best he could to fulfil God's purpose and his own calling by self-improvement-was the monastic profession.

So strong a tendency must have had a reasonable cause. Many things of various character had contributed to bring this about. But one thing must ever be borne in mind if we would understand why monasticism in those times so completely appropriated to itself the name of religion. To comprehend the feelings and thoughts that made it so natural, we must keep in view what was the state of society and life in the world at the time. Since the Gospel had been preached and the Church founded, human society had presented, in the main, but two great aspects: there had been the decaying and infinitely corrupt civilization of the Roman Empire; and then, gradually extinguishing and replacing it, the confused and wild barbarism, full of noble germs for the future, which for ages

followed the triumph of the new nations in Europe. Thus there was the loftiest moral teaching, based on the most overwhelming doctrines which the world. had ever known, confronted with an evil and hopeless condition of things in real life, to which it formed a contrast of which it is impossible for us now even to imagine the magnitude. For eighteen centuries Christianity has been acting on human society; we know but too well how far it is from having really made the world Christian; but though there must always be much question as to degree, no one can seriously doubt that it has done a great deal. But for the first ten of those centuries it can hardly be said to have leavened society at all. Its influence on individuals, so vast and astonishing, was no measure at all of its influence on society at large. It acted upon it doubtless with enormous power; but it was as an extraneous and foreign agent, which destroys and shapes, but does not mingle or renew. It turned the course of events, it changed worship, it built churches, it suppressed customs and institutions, it imposed punishments and penances, it affected language, it introduced powers, it revolutionized policy, it let loose eventful tendencies; but to the heart of society,-to the common life of common men, the ideas, the moralities, the instincts, the assumptions reigning in business or intercourse in the general direction of human activity, to the unpretending, the never-ceasing occupations of family life,the awful visitant from on high, which had conquered an empire and put a bridle into the mouth of barbarians, and transformed, one by one, sinners into saints, had not yet found its way. That ordinary daily routine