law; and the Benedictines were the great authorities and writers on that subject. Another Benedictine, Guido d'Arezzo, was the inventor of the gamut, and the first who instituted a school of music. The monks were the parents of Gothic architecture, the inventors or improvers of the implements used in painting, the discoverers and preparers of some of the finest colors. "As architects, as glass-painters, as mosaic-workers, as carvers in wood and metal, they were," says Mrs. Jameson," the precursors of all that has yet been achieved in Christian art." By exciting the emulation of the secular clergy, and the enforcement of celibacy among its members, which gave them leisure for study, they kept the other branch of the clergy from sinking universally into the total ignorance which in some quarters prevailed among them.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, society had become settled enough to give opportunity for carrying religious instruction among the community at large, and a general thirst for religious knowledge and experience arose. There was found a great want of Christian teachers for the common people. Preaching, the special function of the bishops, had pretty generally fallen into disuse. The only general teaching was the ritual, mechanically administered by a priesthood generally very ignorant, in some quarters unable to read the service. The priests were comparatively few in number, inert, and out of sympathy with the people. The existing orders of monks were, by their principle of seclusion, unable to meet this want. It would seem improbable, that the institution which had afforded relief to a diametrically opposite condition of society should be the one to come forward with relief for this. Yet so it was. By two new orders, the Dominican and the Franciscan, Europe was overspread by a host of zealous and active men, who mixed familiarly with all classes, and devoted themselves to popular instruction. They preached in village and city, in market-place and in camp, performing a great and muchneeded work; making prevalent the custom of popular preaching, and supplying an abundance of fervid preachers and assistants to the parochial clergy; and thus soon making the

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Church doctrine familiar among every class and in every corner of Christendom.

It would be extravagant to say, that the rise of Europe from the chaos, barbarism, and heathenism in which it lay when Benedict's rule began its work, up to the condition of a civilized Christian community, was owing entirely to the monks and the monastic institution, or that it would have been impossible without them; but it is not extravagant to say, that the monastic institution contributed more than any other single element to that result. The moral development which monasticism succeeded in producing, was doubtless deformed by superstition; the intellectual development crude and scanty; the social development rude; the civilization, in a word, imperfect. But it was better, assuredly, that brute violence should have been fettered by the bonds of superstition, than that it should have rioted without control; better the faint and feeble illumination of the cloister, than that the darkness which lay on the mind of man should have remained unbroken. And is it not simply because the modern world had the starting-point of this imperfect civilization to proceed from, that it has been able to attain its own higher civilization?

The world has also been indebted to the monasteries for the example of a generous charity. In the East, the Xenodochium, or asylum for the strangers and poor, was a regular appendix to every monastery. The cloisters of Egypt are found providing subsistence for the unfruitful districts of Libya, and sending shiploads of grain and clothing for distribution among the suffering Alexandrians. In practical Western Europe, this became a still more prominent service of the monks. Requiring but simple and frugal fare themselves, they could devote a large portion of the fruit of their labor to supplying the necessities of the neighboring poor. Many of them had large possessions, whose income was devoted to the same purpose. They were continually exciting the rich and great to deeds of beneficence; and they offered ever-open channels by which that beneficence might be profitably distributed. The monasteries were the almshouses of the Middle Age, asylums for the widow and orphans, the helpless and the forsaken, inns for

travellers, and hospitals for the unfortunate sick, whether suffering in mind or body. "In the relief of indigence," says Hallam, whose caution of statement is so well known, "it may be asserted, that the monks did not fall short of their professions." And in estimating the value of this charity we must recall, as it has been remarked, a social condition very different from our own, a period when there was no public provision for the poor; when, for the wretched, there was absolutely no resource but in private beneficence.

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Another service of the monastic institution was its influence in ennobling poverty, and in creating the spirit of equality and fraternity. "We inquire not," says Isidore, the distinguished Spanish abbot, "whether the novice be rich or poor, bond or free. Neither age nor sex matters among monks." The sons

of the rich and heirs of the proudest houses had to practise the same denials and to perform the same labors as the poorest. Within the monastery's walls, not a few nobles, not a few princes even, cleaned the platters and oiled the shoes of villeins. By the rule of Benedict, the Superior of each monastery was chosen by the suffrages of its inmates. Through the monastery, many a serf, who otherwise would have vegetated in perpetual bondage, worked his way to the chair of the abbot, the mitre of the bishop, sometimes even to the papal throne, and so took his place among nobles, or even above the heads of kings. The democratic element thus penetrated through the barriers of privilege, gained a foothold in the government, and diffused itself through society. Such sights afforded to the poor a precious consolation in their hardships. This fraternity was of great importance also as a connecting link between parts otherwise widely separated in interests and feelings: even among the different nations of Europe, it was a valuable bond of union. Belonging to one order, under one law and discipline, speaking a common language, with a constant communication and circulation between the different national divisions of their own commonwealth, the monks did much in uniting them into a great Christian commonwealth, and thus enabling Christendom to resist the invading league of Islam.

To the constant presence of monasticism were owing the

continuance and final recognition of the celibacy of the clergy. Whatever evils might result from it, it was this that enabled the clergy to maintain itself in the position - indispensable to the Church and to Christianity through the dark ages — of a superior class, separate from the body of the people, a sacred caste, as it were; and yet, at the same time, allowed it to be open, unexclusive, readily receiving new life and energy from all quarters; and thus enabled it to escape, in great measure, the degeneracy or immobility inevitable to an hereditary caste.

The missionary work of the monastic orders has been continued in modern times as zealously as in the Middle Age. Almost all the Roman-Catholic missions have been, and are at present, conducted by members of the monastic orders; and they have pushed the work with an impetuosity, an intrepidity, and a self-sacrifice that cannot but be admired. They have borne the cross into the wigwams of the red man, to the sources of the Amazon, into the jungles of the East Indies, through the heart of China, among the cannibals of Polynesia. They have preached the gospel in regions where no European had ever before set foot, and have brought millions of souls, and provinces of immense magnitude, into the pale of at least a nominal Christianity.

But had the monastic institution performed none of the services we have thus far enumerated, one obligation at least it has conferred upon the world which we are tempted to say would of itself counterbalance all the evils that have been laid to its charge, that of having preserved and handed down to us the literature of antiquity and the Sacred Scriptures. Had it not been for the monks and the monastic institutions, the literature of Greece and Rome, in all human probability, would have been as completely lost as that of Egypt and Assyria; the Bible would have failed to have come down to us; certainly would not have come down to us by so many different channels, and with such faithfulness in each, as it has now done. Outside of the monastery walls, even if a manuscript should by rare good fortune escape the indiscriminate ruin of constant war and pillage, it was sure, in no very great length of time, to perish by neglect, or be destroyed through ignorance

or carelessness of its value. Only in the inviolable precincts, and under the pious care, of monastic communities, could books escape destruction. There are only ten or twelve manuscripts, it is said, which date farther back than the sixth century. Our manuscript copies of all the great classic authors, except Virgil and a small fragment of Homer, and all those of the Scriptures but five or six, date since the fall of the Roman empire and the establishment of the barbarians. These copies we owe, consequently, to the industry of the monks. The monks were, from the commencement of the dark ages until modern times, the sole transcribers of manuscripts. The copying of the Scriptures, in particular, was prescribed by the founders of every monastic order. It was esteemed a holy occupation, and was performed with scrupulous exactness. Many monastic societies gave themselves up entirely to this work; and excellence in the art of calligraphy was the ambition of every community. The phrase "classic literature and the Bible" is soon pronounced; and we are afraid that its full meaning, the full extent of the obligation it implies, will not at once be realized. We must remember not only the high and refined pleasure which we derive from the classics, but what a great influence they have had in originating and perfecting modern literature; how much our laws and political organization owe to the legislation and political experiences of Greece and Rome; how much the picture of a former highly developed society has contributed to the growth of modern civilization. We should recall not only the practical aid and the sweet consolations of the Bible, the faith, heroism, and charity which it has inspired; but we should remember,-what is less readily noticed, but not less worthy of notice,—that, had it not been for that preservation of the Bible, the truths of Christianity would have reached us only in the degree and condition in which they would have been brought down by the corrupting stream of tradition. Christian worship might have degenerated completely into lifeless ceremonial and senseless mummery, and Christian sentiment become irrevocably darkened; it might never have been possible to throw off the dogmas and superstitions of the Romish Church, the dictatorship of the papal