Читать книгу Centuries of Meditations - Thomas Traherne - Страница 13

cloistered author rarely appears to have raised his eyes through his grated window to contemplate a sun which was shining upon the good and the bad alike ; or to have looked abroad and viewed his fellow creatures, hastening, in their several careers, to perform those offices which Providence had destined them to fulfil."

I will quote next a passage from the Quarterly Review for July 1895, which appears in an article entitled "The Passing of the Monk ":—

"Monastic Christianity finds its most complete expression in that small manual of devotion put forth in the fifteenth century, known The Imitation of Christ.' Its boundless popularity reminds us, said Dean Milman, that it supplies some imperious want in the Christianity of mankind; but like monasticism, of which it is the perfect exponent,

‘it is absolutely and entirely selfish in its aims as in its acts; its sole, single, exclusive object is the purification, the elevation of the individual soul, of the man absolutely isolated from his kind, with no fears, no sympathies, and no hopes of our common nature; he has absolutely withdrawn himself not only from the cares, the sins, the trials, but from the duties, the moral and religious fate of the world.’"

It may be thought at first that I have quoted these passages without any sufficient justification; but I think it will be seen directly that they are entirely relevant and even illuminating. The " Imitation," as Dean Milman so well says, represents the spirit of the Cloister, and—shall we add ?—of a narrow and rigid Catholi-

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