Various punishments were employed to correct faults.  Sometimes the offender was whipped on the bare shoulders with a thick rod; others had to lie prostrate in the doorway of the church at each hour, so that the monks passed over his body on entering or going out.

The monks formerly rose at two o’clock, and spent the day in various occupations until eight at night, when they retired.  The following rules once governed St. Gregory’s Monastery in England:  “3:45 A.M.  Rise. 4 A.M.  Matins and lauds, recited; half-hour mental prayer; prime sung; prime B.V.M. recited. 6:30 A.M.  Private study; masses; breakfast for those who had permission. 8 A.M.  Lectures and disputations. 10 A.M.  Little hours B.V.M., recited; tierce, mass, sext, sung. 11:30 A.M.  Dinner. 12 noon.  None sung; vespers and compline B.V.M., recited. 12:30 P.M.  Siesta, 1 P.M.  Hebrew or Greek lecture. 2 P.M.  Vespers sung. 2:30 P.M.  Lectures and disputations. 4 P.M.  Private study. 6 P.M.  Supper. 6:30 P.M.  Recreation. 7:30 P.M.  Public spiritual reading; compline sung; matins and lauds B.V.M., recited; half-hour mental prayer. 8:45 P.M.  Retire[D].”

[Footnote D:  Appendix, Note D.]

Such a routine suggests a dreary life, but that would depend upon the monk’s temperament.  Regularity of employment kept him healthy, and if he did not take his sins too much to heart, he was free from gloom.  Hill very justly observes:  “Whenever men obey that injunction of labor, no matter what their station, there is in the act the element of happiness, and whoever avoids that injunction, there is always the shadow of the unfulfilled curse darkening their path.”  Thus, their ideal was “to subdue one’s self and then to devote one’s self,” which De Tocqueville pronounces “the secret of strength.”  How well they succeeded in realizing their ideal by the methods employed we shall see later.

The term “order,” as applied to the Benedictines, is used in a different sense from that which it has when used of later monastic bodies.  Each Benedictine house was practically independent of every other, while the houses of the Dominicans, Franciscans or Jesuits were bound together under one head.  The family idea was peculiar to the Benedictines.  The abbot was the father, and the monastery was the home where the Benedictine was content to dwell all his life.  In the later monastic societies the monks were constantly traveling from place to place.  Taunton says:  “As God made society to rest on the basis of the family, so St. Benedict saw that the spiritual family is the surest basis for the sanctification of the souls of his monks.  The monastery therefore is to him what the ‘home’ is to lay-folk....  From this family idea comes another result:  the very fact that St. Benedict did not found an Order but only gave a Rule, cuts away all possibility of that narrowing esprit de corps which comes so easily to a widespread and highly-organized body.”