But, toward the close of the last century, its inmates having become slothful and corrupt, it was dismantled, all save a small portion torn down, and the island became the property, first of impiety, embodied in a French actress, and finally of heresy, embodied in an English clergyman.
Bought back for the Church by the Bishop of Fréjus in 1869, there was little revival of life for twelve years. Then came the reaction, religious and political, after the humiliation of France and the Vatican by Germany; and of this reaction the monastery of Saint Honorat was made one of the most striking outward and visible signs. Pius IX interested himself directly in it, called into it a body of Cistercian monks, and it became the chief seat of their order in France. To restore its sacredness the strict system of La Trappe was established—labor, silence, meditation on death. The word thus given from Rome was seconded in France by cardinals, archbishops, and all churchmen especially anxious for promotion in this world or salvation in the next. Worn-out dukes and duchesses of the Faubourg Saint-Germain united in this enterprise of pious reaction with the frivolous youngsters, the petits crevés, who haunt the purlieus of Notre Dame de Lorette. The great church of the monastery was handsomely rebuilt and a multitude of altars erected; and beautiful frescoes and stained windows came from the leaders of the recation. The whole effect was, perhaps, somewhat too theatrical and thin, but it showed none the less earnestness in making the old "Isle of Saints" a protest against the hated modern world.
As if to bid defiance still further to modern liberalism, great store of relics was sent in—among these, pieces of the true cross, of the white and purple robes, of the crown of thorns, sponge, lance, and winding-sheet of Christ—the hair, robe, veil, and girdle of the Blessed Virgin—relics of Saint John the Baptist, Saint Joseph, Saint Mary Magdalene, Saint Paul, Saint Barnabas, the four Evangelists, and a multitude of other saints; so many that the bare mention of these treasures requires twenty-four distinct heads in the official catalogue recently published at the monastery. Besides all this—what was considered even more powerful in warding off harm from the revived monastery—the bodies of Christian martyrs were brought from the Roman catacombs and laid beneath the altars.[1]
All was thus conformed to the mediæval view; nothing was to be left which could remind one of the nineteenth century; the "ages of faith" were to be restored in their simplicity. Pope Leo XIII commended to the brethren the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, as their one great object of study; and works published at the monastery dwelt upon the miracles of Saint Honorat as the most precious refutation of modern science.
- ↑ See the "Guide des Visiteurs à Lérins," published at the monastery in 1880, p. 204; also the "Histoire de Lérins," mentioned below.
