United States or Hungary ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In most of the monasteries there are schools, and the little boys are taught in them, as you see here. Besides this, every boy, when he gets to a certain age, must spend a time, longer or shorter, in the monastery.
Thus the islands each gradually got its hermit, and the great monasteries grew up by degrees, starting usually in the cell of some recluse. Guthlac, who lived in the seventh century, was of the royal House of Mercia, and voluntarily exiled himself in the Fens. This region was then, according to popular belief, the haunt of myriads of evil spirits, who delighted in attacking the hermits.
But the rulers of neighbouring lands, notably Conrad, Duke of Masovia, which lay just to the south, schemed to turn these converted Prussians into political dependents, and Christian welcomed their armies as a means of hastening on the nominal change of religion. A crusade was set on foot; but the natives resisted with success, and began to destroy the monasteries established in the country.
It is a mark of the extraordinary power of Peter that he was enabled to abolish this great dignity without a revolution or bloodshed; and he not only abolished the patriarchal dignity, but he seized the revenues of the Patriarch, taxed the clergy, and partially suppressed monasteries, decreeing that no one should enter them under fifty years of age; yea, he even decreed universal toleration of religion, except to the Jesuits, whom he hated, as did William III. and Frederic II. He caused the Bible to be translated into the Slavonic language, and freely circulated it.
We went to several which have large monasteries attached to them, with great untidy gardens, with ponds for sacred fish and sacred tortoises, and houses for sacred pigs, whose sacredness is shown by their monstrous obesity.
The monasteries of Tintern, Margam, and Neath were built by Norman barons; and Strata Florida, Valle Crucis, and Basingwerk showed that the Welsh princes also welcomed the monks. Better, then, than the brilliant wars were the poets and the great Eisteddvod. Better still, perhaps, were the orchards and the flocks of the peaceful monks.
Probably the numerous Sanskrit works preserved in Tibetan translations then existed in its monasteries. But about the same time the power of the Pâla dynasty, and with it the influence of Buddhism, were curtailed by the establishment of the rival Sena dynasty in the eastern provinces. Still, under Râmapâla, who reigned about 1100, the great teacher Abhayakara was an ornament of the Mahayana.
For a long time the men who knew how to read were nearly always monks or priests. Outside of the monasteries or the bishops' houses there were few books. THE NOBLES. The nobles were either knights, barons, counts, or dukes. In England there were also earls. Many mediaeval nobles ruled like kings, but over a smaller territory.
His sweetness, patience, and humility, and, above all, his marvellous understanding of the doubts and temptations of his own generation, soon drew around him all whose sensitiveness or waywardness had made them unmanageable in the neighbouring monasteries.
The site was at the moment typical of all those which the great monasteries of the West were to turn from desert places to gardens: it was a waste tract of ground called "Thorney," lying low, triangular in shape, bounded by the two reedy streams that descended through the depression which now runs across the Green Park and Mayfair, and emptied themselves into the Thames, the one just above, the other 100 or 200 yards below, the site of the Houses of Parliament.
Word Of The Day