You hear some people
work themselves into a frenzy against the idolatrous worship of our
forefathers; but to a monk of a great monastery his church was his
one idol--to possess a church that should surpass all others in
magnificence, and which could boast of some special unique glory--
that seemed to a monk something worth living for. The holy rood at
Bromholm, the holy thorn at Glastonbury, were possessions that
brought world-wide renown to the monasteries in which they were
found, and gave a lustre to the churches in which they were
deposited; and the intense _esprit de corps_, the passionate
loyalty, of a monk to his monastery is a sentiment which we in our
time find it so extremely difficult to understand that we can hardly
bring ourselves to believe that it could exist without some subtle
intermixture of crafty selfishness as its ruling force and motive.
The church of a monastery was the heart of the place. It was not that
the church was built for the monastery, but the monastery existed for
the church; there were hundreds and thousands of churches without
monasteries, but there could be no monastery without a church. The
monks were always at work on the church, always spending money upon
it, always adding to it, always "restoring" it; it was always needing
repair. We are in the habit of saying, "Those old monks knew how to
build; look at their work--see how it stands!" But we are very much
mistaken if we suppose that in the twelfth or the thirteenth or the
fourteenth century there was no bad building.
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