It is true that the monastic ideal was in some respects narrow and one-sided, that its social and religious life was marred and maimed by an artificial celibacy being put in the place of the natural family life; but granting all this, had not the monastery at its best a noble place in the nation, which is too often lacking to-day, or but imperfectly supplied by other things? The rule of St. Benedict prescribed that seven hours daily should be given by each disciple to manual labour; it was a far-seeing provision, in which there seems to have been realized the thought that study and prayer alone without active work could not provide a complete and healthy life. The Benedictine and Cistercian Abbeys were, at their best, never self-centred institutions whose members pursued their own spiritual welfare without regard to the needs of the world outside. Their scholars copied manuscripts and wrote books for the instruction of men, they were schoolmasters to rich and poor; their lay brothers laboured in the fields, making waste places smooth. Their intercessions went up for others than themselves. Every now and then guests from the great world came to stay within the abbey walls for rest and refreshment of soul, and now and then to end their days in an atmosphere of prayer and peace. In some ways, as we know, the coming of the Friars marked a stage of higher development, in that they [p.137] shared more fully the life of the people, at least in the simplicity and poverty of the early days of the Franciscan movement. Yet another development again is seen in the communities of Brethren of the common life, and in the béguinages of the Low Countries, which combined something of the possibility of individual home life with a common union for prayer. It is interesting to be able to see at Ghent and Bruges to-day these quaint communities, where each inmate has her own house, with perfect liberty to come and go, to mix with the outer world, or even to return to it altogether; but with a common chapel, and a common religious bond visibly uniting the whole sisterhood. Is it not possible, if the Reformation of Henry VIII. had not been so largely political in its origin, that the monastic system might have been in some measure adapted to the needs of the world of to-day without those acts of spoliation which gave the new Tudor aristocracy its wealth and left us these piles of ruined buildings?