Now as a matter of fact the last thirty years have shown an altogether astonishing recrudescence of the monastic spirit, while already the war has added enormously to its force and expansion. Thus far it has been wholly along old-established lines, which was to be expected; but as we approach nearer and nearer to the next nodal point of the year 2000, we are bound to see a variant, a new expression of the indestructible idea. This has always been the case. At the beginning of the Christian era the impulse was personal, the individual was the unit, and the result was the anchorites and hermits, each isolating himself in a hidden mountain cave, a hut in the desert or, if his fancy took this eccentric, on the top of a lonely column, like St. Simon Stylites. With St. Benedict the group became the unit, a sort of artificial family either of men or of women, as the case might be. He himself began as a hermit in the cleft of a far mountain, but within his own lifetime his original impulse was overridden and the new communal or group life came into being, though each monastery or convent was quite autonomous and self-contained. Five centuries later (or four, to speak more exactly) began the Cluniac reform, which was followed by the Cistercian movement, and here, though the old Benedictine mode was followed at first, in a brief time came the differentiation, for now all the houses of one order were united under a centralizing and coördinating force. Here we have the State as the parallel of the new scheme. Latest of all, in another five centuries, came still a new model, the army, with the Society of Jesus as its perfect exponent. So we have at almost exact five-century intervals four models of monasticism: the individual, the family, the State and the army. A fifth is now due; what will be its form? It will, I think, be one in which the human family is made the unit. It will not supersede the older modes but supplement them, for the monks, canons-regular and friars, of the old tradition and the old line, will be as necessary then as ever; instead it will be an amplification of the indestructible idea, fitted to, and developing from, the new conditions which confront society. In addition to the groups of either men or women, living in a community life apart, and vowed to poverty, celibacy and obedience, there will be groups of natural families, father, mother and children, entering into a communal but not by any means “communistic” life, within those Walled Towns they will create for themselves, in the midst of the world but not of it, where the conditions of life will be determined after such sort as will make possible that real and wholesome and joyful and simple and reasonable living that has long been forbidden by the conditions of modern civilization.