In other respects the mode of life was to be simple without extreme rigor, and confined to strictly necessary things. Clothing consisted of a tunic with a black cowl (whence the name Black Friars); the material to be determined by the climate and season. On the two weekly fast days, and from the middle of September to Easter, one meal was to suffice for the day. Each monk is allowed daily a pound of bread and pulse, and, according to the Italian custom, half a flagon (hemina) of wine; though he is advised to abstain from the wine, if he can do so without injury to his health. Flesh is permitted only to the weak and sick,[16] who were to be treated with special care. During the meal some edifying piece was read, and silence enjoined. The individual monk knows no personal property, not even his simple dress as such; and the fruits of his labor go into the common treasury. He should avoid all contact with the world as dangerous to the soul, and therefore every cloister should be so arranged as to be able to carry on even the arts and trades necessary for supplying its wants.[17] Hospitality and other works of love are especially commanded.
The penalties for transgression of the rule are, first, private admonition, then exclusion from the fellowship of prayer, next exclusion from fraternal intercourse, and finally expulsion from the cloister, after which, however, restoration is possible, even to the third time.
Benedict had no presentiment of the vast historical importance which his rule, originally designed simply for the cloister of Monte Cassino, was destined to attain. He probably never aspired beyond the regeneration and salvation of his own soul and that of his brother monks, and all the talk of some later historians about his far-reaching plans of a political and social regeneration of Europe, and the preservation and promotion of literature and art, find no support whatever in his life or in his rule. But he humbly planted a seed which Providence blessed a hundredfold. By his rule, he became, without his own will or knowledge, the founder of an order, which, until in the thirteenth century the Dominicans and Franciscans pressed it partially into the background, spread with great rapidity over the whole of Europe, maintained a clear supremacy, formed the model for all other monastic orders, and gave to the Catholic Church an imposing array of missionaries, authors, artists, bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and popes, as Gregory the Great and Gregory VII. In less than a century after the death of Benedict, the conquests of the barbarians in Italy, Gaul, and Spain were reconquered for civilization, and the vast territories of Great Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia incorporated into Christendom or opened to missionary labor; and in this progress of history the monastic institution regulated and organized by Benedict's rule bears an honorable share.
Benedict himself established a second cloister in the vicinity of Terracina, and two of his favorite disciples, Placidus and St. Maurus,[18] introduced the 'holy rule,' the one into Sicily, the other into France. Pope Gregory the Great, himself at one time a Benedictine monk, enhanced its prestige, and converted the Anglo-Saxons to the Roman Christian faith by Benedictine monks. Gradually the rule found so general acceptance both in old and in new institutions, that, in the time of Charlemagne, it became a question, whether there were any monks at all who were not Benedictines. The order, it is true, has degenerated from time to time, through the increase of its wealth and the decay of its discipline, but its fostering care of religion, of humane studies, and of the general civilization of Europe, from the tilling of the soil to the noblest learning, has given it an honorable place in history and won immortal praise.
The patronage of learning, however, as we have already said, was not within the design of the founder or his rule. The joining of this to the cloister life is due, if we leave out of view the learned monk Jerome, to Cassiodorus, who, in 538, retired from the honors and cares of high civil office in the Gothic monarchy of Italy,[19] to a monastery founded by himself at Vivarium[20] (Viviers), in Calabria, in Lower Italy. Here he spent nearly thirty years as monk and abbot, collected a large library, encouraged the monks to copy and to study the Holy Scriptures, the works of the church fathers, and even the ancient classics, and wrote for them several literary and theological text books, especially his treatise De institutione divinarum literarum, a kind of elementary encyclopædia, which was the code of monastic education for many generations. Vivarium at one time almost rivalled Monte Cassino, and Cassiodorus[21] won the honorary title of the restorer of knowledge in the sixth century.
The Benedictines, already accustomed to regular work, soon followed this example. Thus, that very mode of life which in its founder, Anthony, despised all learning, became, in the course of its development, an asylum of culture in the rough and stormy times of the immigration and the crusades, and a conservator of the literary treasures of antiquity for the use of modern times.
HANNAH THURSTON.
Paul. Well, Dorcas, now you have finished the book, what do you think of it?
Dorcas. I must confess, my expectations on the whole have been agreeably disappointed. From the criticisms I had read, both favorable and adverse, I was fully prepared to quarrel with it from beginning to end. I find in it much power and sustained interest. The descriptions of nature are admirable—fresh, unhackneyed, and vivid. Western New York, with its blue lakes, sloping hills, shining brooks, quiet woodlands, spring buds, autumn flowers, winding country roads, and laden grain fields, stands before one, clearly pictured. The characters, with their isms, seem like old acquaintances, and the seething, fermenting condition of American society is most accurately represented. There is pathos, too, in the story, and many will read it with moistened eyes.