broken down.

The other idea, of men and women weary of the hard struggle with sin,
and fleeing from the wrath to come, joining together to give
themselves up to the higher life, out of the reach of temptation and
safe from the witcheries of Mammon,--that too was a grand idea, and
not unfrequently it had been carried out grandly. But the monk was
nothing and did nothing for the townsman; he fled away to his
solitude; the rapture of silent adoration was his joy and exceeding
great reward; his nights and days might be spent in praise and
prayer, sometimes in study and research, sometimes in battling with
the powers of darkness and ignorance, sometimes in throwing himself
heart and soul into art which it was easy to persuade himself he was
doing only for the glory of God; but all this must go on far away
from the busy haunts of men, certainly not within earshot of the
multitude. Moreover the monk was, by birth, education, and sympathy,
one with the upper classes. What were the rabble to him? [Footnote:
The 20th Article of the Assize of Clarendon is very significant:
"Prohibet dominus rex ne monachi... recipiant _aliquem de minuto
populo in monachum,_ vel canonicum vel fratrem," &c.--Stubbs,
"Benedict Abbas," pref. p. cliv.] In return the townsmen hated him
cordially, as a supercilious aristocrat and Pharisee, with the guile
and greed of the Scribe and lawyer superadded.

Upon the townsmen--whatever it may have been among the countrymen--
the ministers of religion exercised the smallest possible
_restraint._ Nay! it was only too evident that the bonds of
ecclesiastical discipline which had so often exercised a salutary
check upon the unruly had become seriously relaxed of late, both in
town and country; they had been put to too great a strain and had