Europe must ever be indebted to Benedict and his immediate followers for their services in reclaiming waste lands, and in removing the stigma which a corrupt civilization had placed upon labor.  Benedict came before the world saying:  “No person is ever more usefully employed than when working with his hands or following the plough, providing food for the use of man.”  Care was taken that councils should not be called when ploughing was to be done or wheat to be threshed.  Benedict bent himself to the task of teaching the rich and the proud, the poor and the lazy the alphabet of prosperity and happiness.  Agriculture was at its lowest ebb.  Marshes covered once fertile fields, and the men who should have tilled the land spurned the plough as degrading, or were too indolent to undertake the tasks of the farm.  The monks left their cells and their prayers to dig ditches and plough fields.  The effect was magical.  Men once more turned back to a noble but despised industry.  Peace and plenty supplanted war and poverty.  “The Benedictines,” says Guizot, “have been the great clearers of land in Europe.  A colony, a little swarm of monks, settled in places nearly uncultivated, often in the midst of a pagan population—­in Germany, for example, or in Brittany; there, at once missionaries and laborers, they accomplish their double service, through peril and fatigue.”

It is to be regretted that history throws a shadow across this pleasing scene.  When labor came to be recognized as honorable and useful, along came the begging friars, creating, both by precept and example, a prejudice against labor and wealth.  Rags and laziness came to be associated with holiness, and a beggar monk was held up as an ideal and sacred personage.  “The spirit that makes men devote themselves in vast numbers,” says Lecky, “to a monotonous life of asceticism and poverty is so essentially opposed to the spirit that creates the energy and enthusiasm of industry, that their continued coexistence may be regarded as impossible.”  But such a fatal mistake could not long captivate the mind, or cause men to forget Benedict and his industrial ideal.  The blessings of wealth rightly administered, and the dignity of labor without which wealth is impossible, came to be recognized as necessary factors in the true progress of man.

The Monks and Secular Learning

For many centuries, as has been previously shown, the monks were the schoolmasters of Europe.  They also preserved the manuscripts of the classics, produced numerous theological works, transmitted many pious traditions, and wrote some interesting and some worthless chronicles.  They laid the foundations of several great universities, including those of Paris, Oxford and Cambridge.  For these, and other valuable services, the monks merit the praise of posterity.  It is, however, too much to affirm, as Montalembert does, that “without the monks, we should have been as ignorant of our history as children.”  It is altogether improbable that the human mind would have been unproductive in the field of historical writing had monasticism not existed during the middle ages.  While, also, the monks should be thanked for preserving the classics, it should not be supposed that all knowledge of Latin and Greek literature would have perished but for them.