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Show THE POOR OF THE MIDDLE AGES The Nation, in a review of Miss Clay's work, "The Medical Hospitals of England," acknowledges that the poor and the outcast were cared for in the middle ages, and that their wants were met in a spirit very different dif-ferent from that which pervades our modern workhouses. The monasteries monaster-ies were centers of beneficence and charity, and in addition there was an immense number of h6spitals. In England these institutions for the benefit of the suffering numbered no less than ,750. Here provision was made for the leper and the ailing poor, for the aged and the orphan, for the shipwrecked or homeless sailor. "One might fill a volume," observes our contemporary, "with praises of the generosity of pious donors, and sketches of the gentleness and good will that reigned in these medieval 'God's Houses,' in the manner of a sunset picture by Fred Walker." But for all that the nation doubts whether wheth-er the middle ages were really charitable char-itable and humane. It says that the sacrifices made by saints .and others of deep sympathies suggest to it rather rath-er a conscious and passionate protest against the brutality of the rest of the world than a natural expression of pity. It is certain, of course, that there was not then the same general degree of refinement that exists today, to-day, but it is not less unquesionable that kindness towards those in need of assistance was in the middle ages more commonly regarded as an Imperative Im-perative duty than it is now. The ceremony by which the Church segregated segre-gated the leper is no disproof of this. It simply meant that isolation was considered necessary, and that with it was associated a function destined to remind the afflicted that God chastised chas-tised them in order that they might earn a higher heaven reward. |