Chapter 2
Volume 2: 2: Cosette · Book 7: 7: A Parenthesis I
2: The Convent as a Historical Fact
Chapter 2Visible text2 paragraphs
IN the light of history, reason, and truth, monastic life stands condemned.
Monasteries, when they are numerous in a country, are knots in the circulation; encumbrances, centres of indolence, where there should be centres of industry. Monastic communities are to the great social community what the ivy is to the oak, what the wart is to the human body. There prosperity and fatness are the impoverishment of the country. The monastic system, useful as it is in the dawn of civilisation, in effecting the abatement of brutality by the development of the spiritual, is injurious in the manhood of nations. Especially when it relaxes and enters upon its period of disorganisation, the period in which we now see it, does it become baneful, for every reason that made it salutary, in its period of purity.