Such are the natural and almost invariable consequences—in monasteries, or out of them, of every ambitious attempt to render religion a something too elevated and too pure to be brought into contact with the affairs of common life. The mere endeavor generates a pretension that can never be filled out by truth and reality; and the deficiency must be made up by delusion and deception; the one begetting arrogance, the other knavery. * * * * * IV. Greediness of the supernatural formed an essential characteristic of the ancient monachism. The cares, and toils, and necessities, the refreshments and delights of common life, are the great teachers of common sense; nor can there be any effective school of sober reason where these are excluded. Whoever, either by elevation of rank, or by peculiarity of habits, lives far removed from this kind of tuition, rarely makes much proficiency in that excellent quality of the intellect. A man who has little or nothing to do with other men on terms of open and free equality, needs the native sense of five, to behave himself only with a fair average of propriety. Absolute solitude (and seclusion in its degree) necessitates a lapse into some species of absurdity more or less nearly allied to insanity; and religious solitude naturally strays into the regions of vision and miracle.[8] The monastery was at once the place where the illusions of distempered brains were the most likely to abound, and where the frauds which naturally follow in the train of such illusions could the most conveniently be hatched and executed. Those dungeons of dimness, of silence, of absolute obedience; those scenes of nocturnal ceremony; those labyrinths of subterrene communication; those nurseries of craft and credulity, seemed as if constructed for the very purpose of fabricating miracles; and, in fact, if all the narratives of supernatural occurrences that are found upon the pages of the ancient church-writers were numbered, incomparably the larger proportion would appear to have been connected immediately with the religious houses. The wonder which goes to swell the vaunted achievements of the sainted abbot or brother, was effected, we are assured—in the cell, in the chapel or church, in the convent-garden, in the depths of the overhanging forest, or upon the solitude of the neighboring shore! Of all such miracles it is enough to say, that whether genuine or not, they can claim no respect from posterity, seeing that they stand not within the circle of credible testimony. History—lover of simplicity—scorns to place them on her page in any other form than as evidences of the credulity, if not of the dishonesty of the times!