Guienne

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. A CONVENT INTERIOR. Historical Associations.?Domestic Offices.?The White Canons of Premontre.?Moonlight Scene.?'Prayer Meeting' in the Library.?Taking the Vows.? The Convent Roll. The present writer was indebted to an acquaintance of long standing with a literary member of the brotherhood...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. A CONVENT INTERIOR. Historical Associations.?Domestic Offices.?The White Canons of Premontre.?Moonlight Scene.?'Prayer Meeting' in the Library.?Taking the Vows.? The Convent Roll. The present writer was indebted to an acquaintance of long standing with a literary member of the brotherhood (spite of the Protestantism of the one and the advanced Ultramontanism of the other) for the privilege of resting awhile on his journey through Guienne at the monastery of Ste.-Foy, beneath the shadow of the grand monumental church of the same name. To an observer of men and things Latin monasticism is chiefly interesting from a philosophical point of view, quite apart from the specialities of Romanist dogmas and practices, as the visible embodiment in these Western longitudes of the wide-spread monastic idea?an idea which in the East takes form and substance in the populous monasteries of Greek Christianity, and the yet more populous Buddhist conventual hives of both sexes. This idea, let it be ever so little realized in practice, is the same in each case. It is the spirit of retirement from an unsympathetic world that led the Psalmist and the Baptist alike to withdraw into the wilderness?' Lo, I fled, and got me far away: and dwelt in the wilderness'? and which, for more than two thousand years, has prompted many in all countries to follow their example, by exchanging the turmoil and ambitions of a gregarious life for the cloister?whether that cloister be Roman, Greek, or Buddhist, or whether it represent the mildest of all forms of claustral life, the so-called Anglican Sisterhoods and Brotherhoods of our own day and country. It was, then, from this somewhat broad and decidedly undenominational standpoint, no less than from an appreciation of its artistic and romant...