“It is a great and pleasing thing,” he said, “to behold how our Order is spreading through this benighted land, and how spiritual children arise everywhere to our holy father Benedict; surely the time is near at hand when the wilderness shall blossom as the rose.”
The prior, Father Guthlac, entered at this moment, and Dunstan talked apart with him for some moments with extreme earnestness, but only the last words which passed between them were audible.
“Yes, my brother, you have the words of Scripture,” said Dunstan, “to support your proposal: ‘When they persecute you in one city, flee ye unto another.’”
“Yet it is hard to leave a spot one has reared with such tender care.”
“There was One Who left more for us; and I do not think they will destroy the place, or even attempt to destroy it: they will fill it with those ‘slow bellies, those evil beasts,’ the secular clergy, with their wives.”
“Fitter it should be a stye for hogs.” [xxi]
“Nay, they are men after all; yet there is some reason to fear that, like hogs, they wallow in the mire of sensuality; but their day will be but a short one.”
“My father!”
“But a short one; it hath been foreshown me in visions of the night that the Evil One will triumph indeed, but that his triumph will be very short; and, alas a green tree which standeth in the pride of its youth and might must, ere the close of that triumph, be hewn down.”
“By our hands, father?”