RELIGION OF THE MONKS CONSIDERED.
By Elder I. E. Kimball
I HAVE spoken of celibacy and virginity as an imposition upon all the "religious," clergy and ascetics. We have now to consider whether the holiness of the recluse was enhanced thereby. Many persons, "for the kingdom of heaven's sake," have lived in godly simplicity unmarried, and this is recommended in Scripture, in consequence of the natural inclination to seek to please the husband or the wife, rather than God; and because of the inevitable "trouble in the flesh," and worldly cares, Paul says, "I would have you to be without carefulness," "that ye may attend upon the Lord without distraction." 1 Cor. 7:28, 35. Manifestly, then, one who chooses the life of the caelebs (single life) that he may attend upon the Lord without any distraction, chooses the better part. But this is a matter of choice not of necessity, for, adds the apostle, "If he marry he hath not sinned," the Nicene doctors to the contrary, however, for with them to marry was to forsake religion. It must be remembered that the monks were the "religious," the "converted." Now, the one whose heart is so set upon God, whom God has sanctified to do his work, who, that he may attend to the duties of his high calling, would exclude all cares of a worldly nature, cutting every cord that binds to earth, such an one, living in voluntary singleness of life, whom God trusts with his power, may also be safely trusted of man. We have Christ's example in this. But what have we to say of an iron law prohibiting unconditionally and absolutely the marriage state? It is not choice henceforth, but necessity; but what if the heart does not coincide with the outward regulation?—Then the "passions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death." Then when we would do good, evil is present with us, and "the evil which I would not, that I do." Well, then, to impose such a law upon an unconverted man would certainly precipitate his ruin, for the passion for married life will certainly result in his trenching on the rights of others. Therefore, to avoid fornication, saith the Spirit, "let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband." To show the baleful results of that law which imposed celibacy and virginity upon "hundreds of thousands" in the Nicene era (and in fact it has been operative all the way down the ages to the present), we have but to note the confessions of the monks, made at times in their seventieth and eightieth years, showing how they became addicted to horrid vices and subject to loathsome infirmities. Salvian, writing in the generation following the Nicene era, whose testimony is conclusive as showing the quality of the religion which came as a product of these church doctrines, about A.D. 440 said:— But it is only the laity, I warrant you, who sin at this rate. Not surely some of the clergy; worldly men, not surely any of the monks—religiosi! Aye, indeed; under a color of religion, sold to worldly vices, these men, who after a course of shameless profligacy and crime, inscribing themselves with a title of sanctity, differ from what they once were583in profession only, not in conduct. They have changed their name, not their life; and thinking the garb of piety to contain its substance, they have put off the garment only, not the mind of their former estate. So it is that others, with the less odium, profess themselves guilty, who when they declare themselves to have done penance, relinquish neither their former manners nor their attire; for in such sort, on almost all occasions, do they (the monks) behave that you would suppose them not so much to have repented of their former crimes as since to have repented of their repentance; not so much formerly to have repented that they had lived immorally as afterwards that they had promised to live better. These men well know that what I am saying is true; their own conscience bears testimony to every word. . . . After taking the name of penitents they became the buyers of the most ample and unwanted powers. How should not such men repent of their (professed) repentance? Can one believe it that men should have been thinking anything of conversion, and of God, who, abstaining from intercourse with their own wives, have made no scruple of trenching upon the rights of others? and who, while they make profession of bodily continence, act like bacchanals in the debaucheries of the mind? Truly this is a new sort of conversion, which consists in abstaining from what is lawful, and perpetrating what is unlawful. Oh, yes, they deny themselves the marriage bed, but they deny not themselves ravishing! What is this?—Foolish doctrine! God has forbidden sins, not matrimony.—De Gubernatione, pp. 185-187. The facts that God has made marriage lawful for all men, and gives the express enactment that the bishop must be "blameless, the husband of one wife," and "let the deacons be the husband of one wife," show plainly that the Nicene law against marriage was not a good law; for God's laws are good, and this conflicting law was of the devil; and it soon precipitated the church into a mire of pollution. Again, let us examine their piety as expressed in prayer and their daily routine. One author speaks of the devotional labors of the ascetic as "liturgical task work," which they scrupulously adhered to day by day, chalking off prayers by the score and by the hundred as though the demon would have them, if they said one too few. Fifty prayers must be said, fifty psalms sung (more or less according to strength, constancy, and supposed holiness of the performer), as though heaven were pleased with the "multitude of words" wherein "there wanteth not sin." "Ye have wearied the Lord with your words," said the prophet, and Christ spake of the heathen who thought themselves heard for their much speaking. "Be not ye therefore like unto them," said the divine Master, "for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him." The monk viewed God more as a severe taskmaster than as a God of love. How weird and stupid the scene when at midnight the abbot called the sleepers from quiet repose to say a score of prayers and sing or say perhaps an equal number of psalms, and then relegated them to their iron pillows again. They certainly took crosses and judgments into their own hands. They thought to expiate and extirpate sin by scourgings and flagellations. Imagine the poor anchorite in his lone cavern, muttering his many paternosters, counting the rosary, or throwing down a pebble at the conclusion of each; look at the half-frenzied countenance as he sullenly shifts his iron girdles, eats his raw herbs, and drinks his fetid water; look at his dirty sheepskin garb, and still more dirty physiognomy, for water has not cleansed away the filth for years. See him comforting himself with bones and beads and crucifixes, and, horrors! human bones, which he seems to prize as rarest jewels, to charm and drive away foul spirits and fleshly fiends. Tell me, equitable reader, is this Christianity? Listen while he makes supplication to his God. Does he give thanks for sins forgiven and purged by the blood of the Redeemer? Does he render thanks for the gift of the Holy Spirit sent forth into his heart? Does he plead his inability to do any good thing without divine aid and strength from above? Does his countenance beam with joy at thought of the love of his Father and Redeemer, by whom he lives, and through whom he can do all things?—No, we can hear nothing of all this. But see! Here are visitors; they have brought a demoniac, and implore the saint(?) to come forth and expel the spirit. He comes forth; but which is the demoniac and which the saint? We are liable to a sad blunder unless we are careful. Now they set to with oaths and imprecations. He whom ye called saint swears roundly "by Christ," and feins a frightful rage; but the demon submits, they haste away, and the recluse seeks again his cell, for profitable meditation. Such was the religion, and no better, of which the Nicene Church boasted of being in possession.