Excerpt from Three Months in an English Monastery: A Personal Narrative

The following pages contain notes of a visit paid to Claydon in the summer of 1863. Books of travel are much written now-a-days, if not much read, and as we are often told that our own country supplies the widest and most necessitous mission-field without crossing the ocean in search of heathens who need converting, so it not unfrequently happens that as much instruction may he gained by the investigation of home scenes as by researches in foreign climes. At all events, to most Englishmen the monastic system is as much a terra incognita as the source of the Nile, or the interior of the Japanese Empire, and a man who has spent Three Months in a Monastery, though he have naught to relate of perilous encounters and hair-Breadth escapes - though he can grace his narrative with none of the stirring incidents of travel - and though he performed his journey most prosaically by an ordinary English railway - may not unfairly claim some of the respect paid to the visitor of a distant land. The traveller who "does" the Pyramids finds himself surrounded by monuments of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemys, but the inmate of a monastery sees before him daily and hourly a living panorama of the times of St. Benedict and St. Basil, of the ages when those far-off Egyptian deserts were peopled with Antonys and Pachomiuses. Twelve hundred miles may separate the one from his native shores, but the other has travelled back as many years.

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