became the house of industry as well as the temple of prayer.  The forest glades echoed to the stroke of the axe as well as to hymns of praise.  Yes, as Carlyle writes of the twelfth century, “these years were no chimerical vacuity and dreamland peopled with mere vaporous phantasms, but a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things.  The sun shone on it, the vicissitudes of seasons and human fortunes.  Cloth was woven and worn; ditches were dug, furrowed fields ploughed and houses built.”

The Spread of the Benedictine Rule

It is generally held that Benedict had no presentiment of the vast historical importance of his system; and that he aspired to nothing beyond the salvation of his own soul and those of his brethren.

But the rule spread with wonderful rapidity.  In every rich valley arose a Benedictine abbey.  Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, France and Spain adopted his rule.  Princes, moved by various motives, hastened to bestow grants of land on the indefatigable missionary who, undeterred by the wildness of the forest and the fierceness of the barbarian, settled in the remotest regions.  In the various societies of the Benedictines there have been thirty-seven thousand monasteries and one hundred and fifty thousand abbots.  For the space of two hundred and thirty-nine years the Benedictines governed the church by forty-eight popes chosen from their order.  They boast of two hundred cardinals, seven thousand archbishops, fifteen thousand bishops and four thousand saints.  The astonishing assertion is also made that no less than twenty emperors and forty-seven kings resigned their crowns to become Benedictine monks.  Their convents claim ten empresses and fifty queens.  Many of these earthly rulers retired to the seclusion of the monastery because their hopes had been crushed by political defeat, or their consciences smitten by reason of crime or other sins.  Some were powerfully attracted by the heroic element of monastic life, and these therefore spurned the luxuries and emoluments of royalty, in order by personal sacrifice to achieve spiritual domination in this life, and to render their future salvation certain.  But whatever the motive that drew queens and princes to the monastic order, the retirement of such large numbers of the nobility indicates the influence of a religious system which could cope so successfully with the attractions of the palace and the natural passion for political dominion.

Saint Gregory the Great, the biographer of Benedict, who was born at Rome in 540 A.D. and so was nearly contemporaneous with Benedict was a zealous promoter of the monastic ideal, and did as much as any one to advance its ecclesiastical position and influence.  He founded seven monasteries with his paternal inheritance, and became the abbot of one of them.  He often expressed a desire to escape the clamor of the world by retirement to a lonely cell.  Inspired by the loftiest estimates of his holy office, he sought to reform the church in its spirit and life.  Many of his innovations in the church service bordered upon a dangerous and glittering pomp; but the musical world will always revere his memory for the famous chants that bear his name.