Three Months in an English Monastery; a Personal Narrative

-^^K£» $ro%* ignalins. : THREE MONTHS ENGLISH MONASTERY. % fanumal ftotite. CHARLES WALKER. " We must not stint Our necessary ac'ions, in the fear To cope malicious censurers : which ever, As ravenous fishes, do a vessel follow That is new trimm'd." King Henry VIII. LONDON MURRAY AND CO., 13, PATERNOSTER ROW. 1864. — PREFACE. The following pages contain notes of a visit paid to Claydon in the summer of 1863. Books of travel are much written now-a-days, if not much read ; and as we are often told that our own country supplies the widest and most necessitous mission-field without crossing the ocean in search of heathens who need converting, so it not unfrequently happens that as much instruction may he gained by the investigation of home scenes as by researches in foreign climes. At all events, to most Englishmen the monastic system is as much a terra incog- nita as the source of the Nile, or the interior of the Japanese Empire ; and a man who has spent Three Months in a Monastery, though he have naught to relate of perilous encounters and hair-Breadth escapes—though he can grace his narrative with none of the stirring incidents of travel and though he performed his journey most prosaically by an ordinary English railway—may not unfairly claim some of the respect paid to the visitor of a distant land. The traveller who "does" the Pyramids finds himself surrounded by monuments of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemys ; but the inmate of a monastery sees before him daily and hourly a living panorama of the times of St. Benedict and St. Basil, of the ages when those far-off Egyptian deserts were peopled with Antonys and Pachomiuses. Twelve hundred miles may separate the one from his native shores, but the other has travelled back as many years. And as—to carry the comparison further—the philosophical traveller delights to trace the similarity of human instincts and passions in whatever zone, there will be something interesting to Churchmen to mark the witness borne to the unchanging oneness of the faith by the successful working of an English ! IV PREFACE. monastery in the nineteenth century. The same psalms and prayers were said, and at the same hours in the one case as in the other, and in either instance in the common language of the country. Each detail of the habit had been handed down, by the pious conservatism of the Church, unchanged in the minutest matter of detail for thirteen centuries ; and it is instructive to find, in these days when men are striving to sweep away the old landmarks under pretence of adapting themselves to the " altered times," the system that brought the rude peasants of Monte Cassino to the foot of the cross working equally well with the villagers of Suffolk;—to learn that, bridging over alike modern Roman accretions and Protestant negations, the Church of the present can take up common ground with the Church of the sixth century. The subject of Monastic Institutions has never been entirely allowed to die out during the period that has inter- vened since their forcible suppression in this country by the tyrant Henry. Bishop Ridley is known to have lamented the wholesale destruction of communities, which, whatever abuses may have attached themselves to them during the Middle Ages, had in theory, and as regards their constitution, the sanction of those primitive ages of Christianity to whose standard the reformers were endeavouring to bring back the English Church. In the reign of Queen Mary a noble attempt was made to repair the injustice and sacrilege of her royal father. All the moneys that had accrued to the crown by the suppression of the religious houses were restored, and the monks recalled. This act, how- ever, only tended to identify the cause of monachism with that of the papacy. Queen Elizabeth determined to "sup- press" popery as Henry had " suppressed" the monasteries, and employed pretty much the same means. Richard "Whyting, dragged on a hurdle, and executed in sight of his convent for refusing to deliver up Glastonbury Abbey to the king, is ably supplemented by Father Campion hung, drawn, and quartered for " saying mass," and Mar- garet Clitheroe pressed to death for attending thereat Perhaps the " virgin Queen" shares with her sister a slight advantage over their father, in that they deluged the land with blood to bring about a forced unity, he with no higher aim than to fill his own coffers. PREFACE. V When Elizabeth, in the execution of her projects, insti- tuted the Penal Laws, there were, as a matter of fact, no monastic orders but those restored by Mary, and attached to the cause of Rome. They, as the active missionaries of the Papal See, were naturally chiefly obnoxious to the Queen, and were accordingly singled out for destruction. To take the vows of religion in England became punishable with death. Those who had taken them abroad were subject, on their return, to perpetual banishment. Hence, whatever feelings were evoked by the course of circumstances against the papacy, naturally showed themselves especially against the monks ; and hence, too, arose the absurd (though, under the circumstances, natural) identifi- cation of monasticism with 1 Romanism, which still to a great extent survives. Under the Stuarts the Church began rapidly to recover from the terrors of the Egyptian bondage she had suffered under the iron grasp of a Henry, an Edward, a Mary, and an Elizabeth. The Church had time to review her position, and to maintain the real principles of the Reformation—an appeal to Christian antiquity—against foes without and false friends within. Accordingly, we find men foremost in the Church's cause, such as Laud and Taylor, upholding the principles of the monastic state. The former, as is well known, not only led a celibate life himself, in order to " care" the better " for the things of God," but declared his intention, in disposing of his Church patronage, to give the preference, other things being equal, to single over married clergy. The latter, as a voluminous writer, speaks yet more to the point. " Marriage," he says, " is by Christ hallowed into a mystery to represent the sacramental union of Christ and His Church," but " virginity is a life of angels, the enamel of the soul." Reviewing, in his " Life of Christ," the circumstances recorded— in the 19th chapter of St. Matthew, he thus speaks : " He instructeth the Pharisees in the question of divorces, limiting the permission of' separations to the only cause of fornication ; prefereth holy celibate before the estate of marriage in them to whom the gift of continency is given, in order to the kingdom of heaven." " He instructs a young man in the ways and counsels of perfection, besides the observance of precepts by heroical renunciations."— On the subject of vows, he employs this language : " The religion of vows was not — VI PREFACE. only hallowed by the example of Jacob at Bethel, of Hannah praying for a child, and God hearing her, of David vowing a temple to God, and made regular and safe by the rules and cautions in Moses's law—but left by our blessed Saviour in the same constitution He found it, He having innovated nothing in the matter of vows. And it was practised accordingly in the instance of St. Paul at Cenchrea ; of Ananias and Sapphira, who vowed their possessions to the use of the Church ; and of the widows in the apostolical age, who therefore vowed to remain in the state of widowhood, because concerning them who married after the entry into religion, St. Paul says, they have broken their first faith. And such were they of whom our blessed Saviour affirms that some made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven—that is, such who promise to God a life of chastity." But Churchmen of this era were not content with such witnesses as these to an important feature of primitive Christianity. Nicholas Ferrar, himself a deacon, like him whose labours are recorded in these pages, founded a religious house at Little Gidding, on distinctly ascetic principles. Like the later Port Royal, it was a home of sanctified study and prayer, not unmixed with acts of charity, though not professedly a missionary institution. Archbishop Laud warmly interested himself in its welfare, as did also the king. It was swept away in the terrors of the great rebellion. At the Restoration the Church had to regain her lost ground, and barely had she done so when the Revolution drained off some of her best members to the nonjuring cause. To this period belongs Law, the well-known author oX " A Serious Call." We find him thus dealing with the question now under consideration : " Ever since the beginning of Christianity there hath been two orders or ranks of people amongst good Christians. " The one that feared and served God in the common offices and business of a secular worldly life ; the other, renouncing the common business and common enjoyments of life, as riches, marriage, honours, and pleasures, devoted themselves to voluntary poverty, virginity, devotion, and retirement ; that by this means they might live wholly unto God in the daily exercise of a divine and heavenly life. " This testimony I have from the famous ecclesiastical historian Eusebius, who lived at the time of the first general PREFACE. VU council, when the faith of our Nicene creed was established, when the Church was in its greatest glory and purity, when its bishops were so many holy fathers and eminent saints.

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