A famous French novelist who had lived and written as a materialist, turned in his closing years back to the ancient Catholic Church, finding peace and refreshment as a lay guest within the walls of a monastery. Much of his later work may seem exaggerated, and even morbid, in its mysticism, but it was sincere because based upon his own inward experience. In one of these later religious novels he speaks of cloistered convents [p.138] as being "the spiritual lightning conductors of Europe." To him the lives of these poor women, shut off in perpetuity from their fellows, were not wasted, but provided a sacrifice of spiritual struggle on behalf of the erring world outside.
Perhaps Huysmans was not right in thinking that the self-inflicted loneliness of the Poor Clares and Benedictine nuns stood in so high a relation of service to humanity as he pictures; certainly the life of practical prayer lived out by a faithful sister of St. Vincent de Paul amongst the sick poor whom she tends, seems far higher and more Christlike than that of the cloistered ascetic; but still the fact remains that if we are not materialists, but have faith in the effectual working of all true prayer we must hold that the intercessions of the cloister, in so far as they spring from true hearts of faith, are not wasted, but, in some way we cannot understand, flow out for the uplifting of the world.
As we look out at the life of to-day must we not feel that in its rush and hurry, with the thoughtless materialism of its outlook, there is more than ever need for the essential message of the monastery, fellowship in self-surrender and self-control, comradeship in study, work and above all in prayer? Is it not possible for us even now to have in our midst here and there little colonies which will do for our age the work which the best monasteries did for the Middle Ages, and perhaps [p.139] something more even than this, in that we need no longer have their limitations?
What would such a monastery be, if we can picture it in its main features?
The first monks were always anxious to have their cells built in some out of the way spot, and sometimes moved the site of their abbeys to avoid the dangers to their inward life which seemed to them to come with the invasions of sounds and sights, which the approach of "the world" brought with it. We do not now believe in the separation of the life of the Church from that of men outside it, and there was at times, perhaps, some thing selfish in the monkish love of quiet isolation, but for certain high purposes of the monastery there was a sound instinct in it too. If the community remains in living touch with those without, sending its members out from it and receiving guests on visits long or short, it will, in many cases, do its work best if its situation provides it with a natural atmosphere and background of peace and quiet, corresponding to that inward atmosphere which is to play around the life of its members.