are beyond the mere literary workman. And as such we gladly welcome it. If (in so far as we may judge of it by the present specimen) it contain little that is new to the student who has a moderate acquaintance with Church history, it presents old facts with freshness and life, and it will be useful by reaching many who do not profess to be students of Church history. Nor do we think that there is any serious cause of apprehension lest the author's views as a Romanist should do harm to members of our own communion; for those must be very ill instructed members of the English Church who can be misled by M. de Montalembert's Roman peculiarities or even by the eloquence with which they are enforced. He has, indeed, learnt something since the publication of his first work,-perhaps more than he suspects or would allow. There is nothing here like the tone in which he affected five-and-twenty years ago to speak of 'La chère Ste. Elisabeth;' and legends such as he then related with an appearance of simple credence worthy of a 'Canon of Northampton' are here often treated in a style which reminds us of Paulus or Strauss. M. de Montalembert has found out the falsity of some ideals which once enjoyed all his reverence, and he has discovered that there may be good where in his earlier days he did not imagine that it could be found.

The new work opens with an Introduction, which occupies about half of the first volume. This is perhaps the most interesting portion of the whole, as being that in which we see most of the author's mind; but, as it appears to have been written later than the body of the book, and for the most part treats of later matters, we shall follow the order of production and of subject rather than that of arrangement.

Passing over the Introduction, therefore, we find that the First Book opens with a sketch of the Roman Empire after the Peace of the Church;' and a very dark sketch it is. M. de Montalembert tells us that, when Constantine made Christianity the religion of the empire, the corruption of Roman life was advanced beyond all possibility of cure; that it continued to advance, notwithstanding all the checks which the new faith could oppose to its progress; and that, in short, the Gospel must be considered to have failed in the empire. Some part of this appears to us very questionable. That the Christianity of the empire suffered grievously from the infection of Roman morals, there can be no question; and, of course, when Christianity was professed, the same evils were far more scandalous than they had been under heathenism. But if the general corruption was worse after the time of Constantine than before, M. de Montalembert has at least given no proof that it was. We cannot, however, go far in the

book

book without discovering a reason why, if things were not really worse, they ought, in our author's opinion, to have been so; for M. de Montalembert has in a very high degree that characteristic which Arnold, in speaking of Mitford, called an acute feeling of his own times.' This shows itself not only in the Introduction (where it might be expected as a thing of course), but throughout the narrative chapters also there is a continual 'war of allusions' -the only kind of war which was possible for a French oppositionist in the beginning of 1860, whatever may be the effect of the changes announced in the name of the Emperor Napoleon towards the end of that year. We need not remind our readers how steadily this war has been carried on through all possible channels-academic discourses, allegorical histories and essays, and the like-with an ingenuity which was intended to leave the authorities whom it assailed no other alternative than that of choosing between silence and censure, as the least dangerous way of admitting that the parallels of history were against them. And thus we find, before reading many pages, that this is not only a history of Western Monachism, but a covert attack on the monarchy of the 2nd of December. Imperialism, according to M. de Montalembert, has been the great curse of the world. It was, above all other evil influences, the influence of the emperors that marred the Christianity of Rome. It was the imperialism of Constantinople, and the connexion of the Church with the Byzantine state, that ruined the Christianity of the East. And Rome and the East are made to serve as types of modern France. There is, for example, no mistaking the inner meaning of such passages as the following:

The senate, excluded from all political action since the time of Diocletian, subsists only as a sort of great municipal council, whose business it is to dishonour in history the name and the title of the most august assembly that ever governed men. Nothing ever equalled the abjectness of these Romans of the Empire. With their ancient liberty, all virtue, all manliness have disappeared; there remains nothing but a society of functionaries, without vigour, without honour, and without rights. Without rights, I say, for in all the imperial world no one possessed even the shadow of a real and a sacred right. This I boldly affirm, in opposition to all the learned panegyrists of that government; for the Roman empire, the type and cradle of all modern slaveries, has found numerous apologists and admirers in our days, when people are glad to feel the necessity of justifying the • present by theories borrowed from the past.'-i. 22-3.

And if the history of the monks engaged our author's attention under Louis Philippe, the following note may show that it has since acquired a fresh charm for him :

At

'At the most degraded period of the literature of our centuryunder the First Empire-it is delightful to find these words in a letter of the honest and courageous Ducis-" My dear friend, I am reading the Lives of the Fathers of the Desert."-i. 57.

The same book which served under the First Napoleon to console Ducis, by carrying his thoughts to a world different from that of his own time, has since served the same purpose for M. de Montalembert. But to resume our analysis.

The evils of Roman society, says our author, were too strong for all the brilliant genius and all the indefatigable labours of the great men who adorned the Church in the centuries which followed the conversion of Constantine: had it been otherwise, they could only have succeeded in turning it into a sort of Christian China (i. 28). Without pretending to understand this, we should think that, as the great men in question rose above the Chinese influences (whatever these may have been) of the ages in which they lived, they would, if they had succeeded in influencing their contemporaries, have raised them, too, above the danger of becoming Christian Chinamen. But, continues M. de Montalembert, Providence made choice of another way. The hopelessly corrupt Roman society was overwhelmed by the barbarians, who brought with them an energy such as had long died out among the Romans, and along with it new ideas of liberty and of honour. But unhappily the barbarians themselves became tainted by the corruption of Roman life; and, in order to the restoration of the world, another new influence was needed-the influence of the monks (i. 35).

M. de Montalembert does not consider the idea of religious seclusion as peculiar to Christianity; he sees it in the Buddhist system, where he supposes it to have existed long before the Christian era; he sees it in Pythagoras and in Plato, in the Old Testament prophets from Samuel downwards, and especially in Elijah and St. John the Baptist; and, as to Christian times, he tells us that the highest authorities agree in acknowledging that it was born with the Church, and has never ceased to coexist with it' (i. 41-6). If we ask who these highest authorities are, we are answered by quotations from St. Chrysostom,* St. Jerome, and St. Bernard, from Cassian's Collations, and from a council held at Thionville in 844, which declares that the sacred order of monks was inspired by God, and was founded

*We are not sure that (as M. de Montalembert assumes) St. Chrysostom, in contrasting the practical effects of the philosophy, which was introduced among mankind by Christ,' with those of the heathen philosophy (ad Pop. Antioch., xvii., t. ii., p. 173 E., ed. Montf.), means to speak of the Christian philosophy (i. e. monachism) as having existed from the very beginning of the Gospel. by

by the Apostles themselves' (i. 46-7). We must say, however, that it would have been more satisfactory to us if authorities of a more critical and more impartial character had been cited; and we certainly think that M. de Montalembert would have shown a wise discretion by avoiding any attempt at Scriptural proof of his opinion, if he had nothing more cogent of this kind to produce than the only two texts which he has quoted-our Lord's speech to the rich young man (Luke xviii. 22), and His assurance that all who shall renounce worldly blessings for His sake shall in this world receive an hundredfold, with persecutions' (Mark x. 29, 30).

6

But, leaving these things to count for what they are worth, let us go on to the sketches of The Monastic Precursors of the East.' Here we find the well-known stories of Antony and other Egyptian recluses agreeably told, and extracts of considerable length from the Lives of Fathers,' published by Rosweyd. On this work (which, as we have seen, was read by Ducis as a relief from the troubles of the First Napoleon's reign) M. de Montalembert pronounces an enthusiastic eulogium :

'What man could be ignorant enough and unhappy enough not to have devoured these tales of the heroic age of monachism? Who is there that has not breathed with love the perfume of these flowers of solitude? Who has not contemplated, if not with the eyes of faith, at least with the admiration which an incontestable greatness of soul inspires, the struggles of these athletes of penitence? . . . . . It is impossible to tear ourselves from these narratives. Everything is to be found in them-variety, pathos, the sublimity and the epic simplicity of a race of men artless as children and strong as giants.'—i. 57.

For ourselves, we must avow that, as we read the book with different prepossessions from M. de Montalembert, so the impression which it made on us was different from that which is thus eloquently expressed. As to the question, in how far the stories which it contains are true, M. de Montalembert does not speak, and very possibly he may doubt or disbelieve much of what is more extraordinary in them. For our present purpose, however, the most important question is not that of their truth, but the value of the ideal which is embodied in them. And on this point M. de Montalembert must be prepared to find in his Protestant readers an irreconcileable difference from his opinion. When, for example, he tells us with admiration that St. Macarius of Alexandria, having received a bunch of grapes, and feeling a strong desire to eat them, handed it to one of his brethren; that this brother, with a like control over a like appetite for the tempting fruit, passed it on to another; and that thus it made the round of the whole

whole monastic party, until it returned to Macarius himself, who thereupon threw it away (i. 66),—he must allow us to think that such heroism as this is a triumph of fantastical affectation over that truer piety which sees God's goodness in His earthly gifts to man. Nor must he expect us to admire the same Macarius, because, in order to subdue the rebellion of his flesh,' he exposed his naked body for six months in a morass, where the gnats were as large as wasps, and could sting through the hide of a wild boar (i. 66). Perhaps, indeed, M. de Montalembert, in choosing between the version of this story which we have quoted from him, and another in which the motive of the penance is said to have been remorse for having killed a gnat, may have been influenced by a wish to avoid reminding his readers of a later and better-known professor of extraordinary sanctity, who penitently accused himself,—

'D'avoir pris une puce en faisant sa prière,

Et de l'avoir tuée avec trop de colère.'

*

M. de Montalembert expresses great admiration on account of the number of the Egyptian monks.

'Nothing, in the marvellous history of these solitaries, is more incredible than their number. But the most imposing authorities agree in affirming it. It was a sort of emigration from cities to the desert, from civilisation to simplicity, from noise to silence, from corruption to innocence. When once the current was established, swarms of men, of women, of children, throw themselves headlong into it, and flow along during a century with irresistible force. Let us quote some figures. Pachomius, who died at fifty-six, reckons 3000 monks under his rule; his monasteries of Tabenna soon contained 7000; and St. Jerome affirms that at the annual meeting of the congregation of monasteries which followed his rule, as many as 50,000 monks were to be seen. . . . . It is even asserted that in Egypt the number of monks in the desert was equal to that of inhabitants in the towns. Nay, the towns themselves were, as it were, inundated with them, since in 356 a traveller found in the town of Oxyrynchus alone 10,000 monks and 20,000 consecrated virgins.'-i. 68-9.

There are, as we shall again have occasion to observe, questions of political economy as to the expediency of allowing such enormous numbers of men and women to withdraw themselves

See Migne's 'Patrologia,' lxxiii. 1113; lxxiv. 270-1. In common with M. de Montalembert (Introd. cclxxix.) we are glad to express our gratitude to the Abbé Migne for having in this series made the Christian writers of the first twelve centuries accessible at a wonderfully cheap rate; but we must express the regret, which every one acquainted with the work must feel, on account of its frequent inaccuracy in printing. We have lately been informed that M. Migne, having already carried his Latin series as far as Innocent III., and his Greek series as far as Photius, intends to continue the Greek Patrologia' to the Council of Florence, and the Latin to the Council of Trent.

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