Les Miserables, Wilbour Translation

MONASTICISM, such as it was in Spain, and such as it is in Thibet, is for civilisation a kind of consumption. It stops life short. It, in one word, depopulates. Monastic incarceration is castration. In Europe, it has been a scourge. Add to that, the violence so often done to conscience; the ecclesiastical calling so frequently compulsory; the feudal system leaning on the cloister; primogeniture emptying into the monastery the surplus of the family; the ferocious cruelties which we have just described; the in pace; mouths closed, brains walled-up, so many hapless intellects incarcerated in the dungeons of eternal vows; the assumption of the gown, the burial of souls alive. Add these individual torments to the national degradation, and, whoever you may be, you will find yourself shuddering at the sight of the frock and the veil, those two winding sheets of human invention.

However, on certain points and in certain places, in spite of philosophy, and in spite of progress, the monastic spirit perseveres in the full blaze of the nineteenth century, and a singular revival of asceticisai, at this very moment, amazes the civilised world. The persistence of superannuated institutions in striving to perpetuate themselves is like the obstinacy of a rancid odour clinging to the hair; the pretension of spoiled fish that insists on being eaten, the tenacious folly of a child's garment trying to clothe a man, or the tenderness of a corpse returning to embrace the living.