generations, the spontaneous instruments of his purposes,these all unite to prove that profound genius, extensive knowledge, and earnest meditation, had raised him to the very first rank of uninspired legislators. His disciples, indeed, find in his legislative wisdom a conclusive proof that he wrote and acted under a divine impulse. Even to those who reject this solution it is still a phænomenon affording ample exercise for a liberal curiosity.

That the Benedictine statutes remain to this day a living code, written in the hearts of multitudes in every province of the Christian world, is chiefly perhaps to be ascribed to the inflexible rigour with which they annihilated the cares and responsibilities of freedom. To the baser sort no yoke is so galling as that of self-control; no deliverance so welcome as that of being handsomely rid of free agency. With such men mental slavery readily becomes a habit, a fashion, and a pride. To the abject many, the abdication of self-government is a willing sacrifice. It is reserved for the nobler few to rise to the arduous virtues of using wisely the gifts which God bestows, and walking courageously, though responsibly, in the light which God vouchsafes.

And by the abject many, though often under the guidance of the nobler few, were peopled the cells of Monte Casino and her affiliated convents. Their gates were thrown open to men of every rank, in whom the abbot or prior of the house could discover the marks of a genuine vocation. To exclude any such candidate, though a pauper or a slave, would have been condemned by Benedict, in the words and spirit of Augustine, as grave delictum. In those sacred enclosures, therefore, many poor and illiterate brethren found a refuge. But they were distinguished from the rest as conversi,—that is, as persons destined neither for the priesthood nor the tonsure, but bound to labour for the society as husbandmen, shepherds, artizans, or domestic servants.

In the whirl and uproar of the handicrafts of our own day, it is difficult to imagine the noiseless spectacle which in those ages so often caught the eye, as it gazed on the secluded abbey and the adjacent grange. In black tunics, the mementos of death, and in leathern girdles, the emblems of chastity, might then be seen carters silently yoking their bullocks to the team, and driving them in silence to the field, or shepherds interchanging some inevitable whispers while they watched their flocks, or vine-dressers pruning the fruit of which they might neither taste nor speak, or wheelwrights, carpenters, and masons plying their trades like the inmates of some deaf and dumb asylum,

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and all pausing from their labours as the convent bell, sounding the hours of primes or nones or vespers, summoned them to join in spirit, even when they could not repair in person, to those sacred offices. Around the monastic workshop might be observed the belt of cultivated land continually encroaching on the adjacent forest; and the passer by might trace to the toils of these mute workmen the opening of roads, the draining of marshes, the herds grazing, and the harvests waving in security, under the shelter of ecclesiastical privileges which even the Vandal and the Ostrogoth regarded with respect. Our own annual agricultural meetings, with their implements and their prizes, their short horns and their long speeches, must carry back their economic genealogy, to those husbandmen who, with dismal aspect, brawny arms, and compressed lips, first taught the conquerors of Rome the science in which Columella and Virgil had instructed the ancient Romans.

A similar pedigree must be assigned to our academies of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. The fine arts are merely imitative in their infancy; though as they become mature, they also become symbolical. And this maturity is first attained by the architect, because he ministers to a want more urgent than the rest, because, in the order of time, the edifice must precede the works designed for its embellishment, and because finding in nature no models, except for the details of his performance, he must, from the first, be inventive in the composition of it. Thus the children of Benedict, when contemplating their lofty avenues sacred to meditation-and the mellowed lights streaming through the foliage and the flowers clustering in the conventual garden- and the pendulous stalactites of the neighbouring grottoes,conceived of a Christian Temple in which objects resembling these, though hewn out of imperishable stone, and carved into enduring forms, might be combined and grouped together into one glorious whole. With a ritual addressed to the eye rather than to the ear-a sacred pantomime, of which the sacrifice of the mass was the action, the priests the actors, and the high altar the stage, nothing more was requisite to the solemn exhibition but the cathedral as its appropriate theatre. It arose, therefore, not the servile representation of any one natural object, but the majestic combination of the forms of many; and full of mystic significance, in the cruciform plan, the lofty arch, the oriel windows, the lateral chapels, and the central elevation. Not a groining, a mullion, or a tracery, was there, in which the initiated eye did not read some masonic enigma, some ghostly counsel, or some inarticulate summons to confession, to penitence or to prayer.

Every niche without, and every shrine within these sanctuaries, was adorned with images of their tutelary saints; and especially of Her who is supreme among the demigods of this celestial hierarchy. But, instead of rising to the impersonation of holiness, beauty, or power in these human forms, the monkish sculptors were content to copy the indifferent models of humanity within their reach; and the statues, busts, and reliefs which, in subsequent times, fell beneath the blows of Protestant Iconoclasts had little if any value but that which belonged to their peculiar locality and their accidental associations. In painting also, whether encaustic, in fresco, or on wood, the performances of the early Benedictine artists were equally humble. In order to give out their visible poetry, the chisel and the pencil must be guided by minds conversant with the cares and the enjoyments of life; for it is by such minds only that the living soul which animates mute nature can ever be perceived; or can be expressed in the delineation of realities, whether animated or inanimate. In ecclesiastical and conventual architecture, and in that art alone, the monks exhausted their creative imagination; covering Europe with monuments of their science in statics and dynamics, and with monuments of that plastic genius, which from an infinity of elaborate, incongruous, and often worthless, details, knew how to evoke one sublime and harmonious whole. In those august shrines, if any where on earth, the spirit of criticism is silenced by the belief that the adorations of men are mingling in blessed accord with the hallelujahs of heaven.

To animate that belief, the Benedictine musicians produced those chants which, when long afterwards combined by Palestrina into the Mass of Pope Marcellus, were hailed with rapture by the Roman Conclave and the Fathers of Trent, as the golden links which bind together in an indissoluble union the supplications of the Militant Church and the thanksgivings of the Church Triumphant.

Lusts of the imagination!' exclaimed, and may yet exclaim, the indignant pulpits of Scotland and Geneva lusts as hostile to the purity of the Christian Faith as the grosser lusts of 'the flesh or the emptiest vanities of life.' Hard words these for our restorers of church architecture in mediæval splendour! Let the Camden Society, the Lord of Wilton, and the benchers of the Temple look to it; while we, all innocent of any such sumptuous designs her Majesty's Church Building Commissioners themselves not more so - refer to these Benedictine prodigies only as illustrating a memorable passage in Benedictine history.

But art was regarded by the fathers of that order rather as

the delight than as the serious occupation of their brotherhood. With a self-reliance as just as that of the great philosopher, if not as sublime, they took to themselves all knowledge as their proper province. Their rule assigned an eminent rank among monastic virtues to the guardianship and multiplication of valuable manuscripts. It taught the copyist of a holy book to think of himself as at once a pupil and a teacher,—as a missionary while seated at his desk-using each finger as a tongue- inflicting on the Spirit of Evil a deadly wound at each successive line and as baffling, with the pen, the dread enemy, who smiles at the impotent hostility of every other weapon grasped by the hand of mortal man. In each Benedictine monastery a chamber was set apart for the discharge of this sacred office. In this Scriptorium, some of the monks plied their pens assiduously, and in profound silence, to produce faultless transcripts of the best originals. To others was committed the care of revising the text of such works as were then held in the highest esteem. Charlemagne himself assigned to the Benedictine Alcuin the high office of preparing, from the various sources within his reach, a perfect Codex of the Holy Scriptures. For what remains to us of Pliny, Sallust, and Macrobius, and for the orations against Verres, we are indebted to their literary zeal. A tribute of writing materials at the commencement of each novitiate, and another of books at its close, with an annual import of manuscripts from the inferior houses, were continually augmenting the libraries of their greater convents. How extensive and how valuable such collections became, may be inferred from the directions given by the Benedictine Cassiodorus for the guidance of his brethren in their studies. He had collected, and he enjoins them to read, the Greek and Latin fathers, the Church historians, the geographers and grammarians whose works were then extant and in repute, with various medical books, for the assistance of those monks to whom the care of the infirmary was confided. Whoever will consult the Historia Rei Literariæ Ordinis Sancti 'Benedicti,' by their historiographer Magnoaldus Zeigelbauer, may rapidly accumulate the most conclusive proofs, that by their Order were either laid or preserved the foundations of all the eminent schools of learning of Modern Europe.

The greatness of the Benedictines did not, however, consist either in their agricultural skill, their prodigies of architecture, or their priceless libraries; but in their parentage of countless men and women, illustrious for active piety for wisdom in the government of mankind-for profound learning - and for that contemplative spirit, which discovers within the soul itself

things beyond the limits of the perceptible creation. Such, indeed, is the number of these worthies, that, if every page at our disposal were a volume, and every such volume as pouderous as our old acquaintance, Scapula, space would fail us to render justice to the achievements of the half of them. We cannot, however, pass by this goodly fellowship without a transient glance at one normal type, at the least, of each of these various forms of Benedictine heroism. For that purpose we need scarcely wander from the annals of our own land.

In the Benedictine abbey of Nutsall, near Winchester, Poetry, History, Rhetoric, and the Holy Scriptures were taught, in the beginning of the eighth century, by a monk whom his fellow countrymen called Winfred, but whom the Church honours under the name of Boniface. He was born at Crediton, in Devonshire, of noble and wealthy parents, who had reluctantly yielded to his wish to embrace the monastic state. Hardly, however, had he reached middle life, when his associates at Nutsall discovered that he was dissatisfied with the pursuits by which their own thoughts were engrossed. As, in his evening meditations, he paced the long conventual avenue of lime trees, or as, in the nightwatches, he knelt before the crucifix suspended in his cell, he was still conscious of a voice, audible though inarticulate, which repeated to him the Divine injunction, to go and preach the Gospel to all nations.' Then, in mental vision, was seen stretching out before him the land of his German ancestry; where, beneath the veil of the customs described by Tacitus, was concealed an idolatry of which the historian had neither depicted, nor probably conjectured the abominations. To encounter Satan in this stronghold, became successively the day dream, the passion, and the fixed resolve of Boniface; until, at length, abandoning, for this holy war, the studious repose for which he had already abandoned the world, he appeared, in his thirtysixth year, a solitary and unbefriended inissionary, traversing the marshy sands and the primæval forests of Friesland. But Charles Martel was already there, -the leader in a far different contest; nor, while the Christian Mayor of the Palace was striking down the Pagans with his battle-axe, could the pathetic entreaties of the Benedictine Monk induce them to bow down to the banner of the Cross. He therefore returned to Nutsall, not with diminished zeal, but with increased knowledge. He had now learnt that his success must depend on the conduct of the secular and spiritual rulers of mankind, and on his own connexion with them.

The chapter of his monastery chose him as their abbot: but, at his own request, the Bishop of Winchester annulled the