So though it spread, it was not as a contagion of health, but as an infectious disease, whose evil effects are traceable in the decrepitude which the Oriental Church has never been able to throw off. In the Western Church, Monachism, though less brilliant in its beginnings than its Eastern precursor, has had a longer and healthier course. It is not within the scope of this lecture even to sketch it, or to analyse and tabulate its results. We live in an age which has certainly little sympathy with the ideal of Christianity which it sought to realise, but that is not sufficient reason that we should affect to despise it, or imagine that we have outgrown the necessity for it. The life of the recluse may be beyond our attainment, for we may be so afraid to be alone, and so unable to endure “conversation with ourselves,” that we have to take refuge in perpetual society. The “weakness” of the old asceticism many of us have not the strength to practise, for we are too much under the dominion of the flesh, which they at least could master, and we are far too inclined to treat with unnecessary tenderness what they chastised and immolated. The vows of poverty and obedience and chastity may be the very medicine we require, in a condition of public sentiment so unhealthy that a man’s standing, and worth, and even life, seems to consist in the abundance of his goods, and his freedom in licence to despise all authority and indulge all his likings. No doubt, in the West as in the East, Monachism eventually became an impediment to Christian civilisation, but not until it had considerably regenerated and uplifted it. It kept before the Church the dignity of manual labour, it wiped out the discredit attaching to honest poverty, it proclaimed the equality of men by treating rich and poor alike, and it proved the defender of the oppressed, the mediator between the strong and the feeble. “We are the poor of Christ,” says Bernard, “and the friendship of the poor makes us the equals of kings.” Then just as unquestionably it was the pioneer of learning and of enterprise, the guardian of law and the fosterer of charity. There is hardly a city or populous centre in Europe which does not owe its churches, universities, hospitals, charitable institutions, either in their origin or growth, to the cœnobites and celibates of former ages; and whether we acknowledge or repudiate our debt to them, “its magnitude confronts us more imposingly the more we honestly consider it.”