Augustine published a celebrated essay,—­“On the Labor of Monks,”—­in which he pointed out the dangers of monachism, condemned its abuses, and ended by sighing for the quiet life of the monk who divided his day between labor, reading and prayer, whilst he himself spent his years amid the noisy throng and the perplexities of his episcopate.

These men, and many others, did much to further monasticism.  But we must now leave sunny Africa and journey northward through Gaul into the land of the hardy Britons and Scots.

Athanasius, the same weary exile whom we have encountered in Egypt and in Rome, had been banished by Constantine to Treves, in 336.  In 346 and 349 he again visited Gaul.  He told the same story of Anthony and the Egyptian hermits with similar results.

The most renowned ecclesiastic of the Gallican church, whose name is most intimately associated with the spread of monasticism in Western Europe, before the days of Benedict, was Saint Martin of Tours.  He lived about the years 316-396 A.D.  The chronicle of his life is by no means trustworthy, but that is essential neither to popularity nor saintship.  Only let a Severus describe his life and miracles in glowing rhetoric and fantastic legend and the people will believe it, pronouncing him greatest among the great, the mightiest miracle-worker of that miracle-working age.

Martin was a soldier three years, against his will, under Constantine.  One bleak winter day he cut his white military coat in two with his sword and clothed a beggar with half of it.  That night he heard Jesus address the angels:  “Martin, as yet only a catechumen has clothed me with his garment.”  After leaving the army he became a hermit, and, subsequently, bishop of Tours.  He lived for years just outside of Tours in a cell made of interlaced branches.  His monks dwelt around him in caves cut out of scarped rocks, overlooking a beautiful stream.  They were clad in camel’s hair and lived on a diet of brown bread, sleeping on a straw couch.

But Martin’s monks did not take altogether kindly to their mode of life.  Severus records an amusing story of their rebellion against the meager allowance of food.  The Egyptian could exist on a few figs a day.  But these rude Gauls, just emerging out of barbarism, were accustomed to devour great slices of roasted meat and to drink deep draughts of beer.  Such sturdy children of the northern forests naturally disdained dainty morsels of barley bread and small potations of wine.  True, Athanasius had said, “Fasting is the food of angels,” but these ascetic novices, in their perplexity, could only say:  “We are accused of gluttony; but we are Gauls; it is ridiculous and cruel to make us live like angels; we are not angels; once more, we are only Gauls.”  Their complaint comes down to us as a pathetic but humorous protest of common sense against ascetic fanaticism; or, regarded in another light, it may be considered as additional evidence of the depravity of the natural man.