“Why in these days, when for ten years past the Benedictine Sisters have made a study of Latin, when many of them translate from Hebrew and Greek and are skilled in exegesis, when others draw and paint the pages of missals, reviving the art of the illuminators of the Middle Ages, when others again—­as, for instance, Mother Hildegarde—­are organists of the highest attainment, you may easily understand that the woman who directs them all, the woman who has created in her Sisterhoods a school of practical mysticism and of religious art, is a very remarkable person; nay, in these days of frivolous devotions and ignorant piety, quite unique.”

“Why, she is one of the great Abbesses of the Middle Ages,” cried Durtal.

“She is the crowning work of Dom Gueranger, who took her in hand almost as a child and kneaded and mollified her soul with long patience; then he transplanted her into a special greenhouse, watching her growth in the Lord day after day; and you see the result of this forcing and high culture.”

“Yes, and even this does not hinder some persons from regarding convents as the homes of idleness and reservoirs of folly.  When you think that obscure idiots write to the papers to say that nuns know nothing of the Latin they repeat!  It would be well for them if they knew as much Latin as those women!”

The Abbe smiled.

“And the secret of the Gregorian chant dwells with them,” he went on.  “It is necessary not only to understand the language of the Psalms as they are sung, but to appreciate meanings which are often doubtful in the Vulgate, in order to express them properly.  Without fervent feeling and knowledge, the voice is nothing.

“It may be beautiful in secular music, but it is null and void when it attempts the venerable sequences of plain-song.”

“And how are the Fathers employed?”

“They also began by restoring the liturgy and Church singing; then they discovered certain lost texts of the subtle symbolists and learned saints, and collected them in a Spicilegium and Analectae.  Now they are editing and printing a musical Palaeography, one of the most learned and abstruse of modern publications.

“Still, I would not have you believe that the whole mission of the Benedictine Order consists in overhauling ancient manuscripts and reproducing ancient Antiphonals and curious chronicles.  The Brother who has a talent for any art devotes himself to it, no doubt, if the Superior permits; on this point the rule knows no exception; but the real and true aim of the Son of Saint Benedict is to sing Psalms and praise the Lord, to serve his apprenticeship here for his task in Heaven:  namely, to glorify the Redeemer in words inspired by Himself, and in the language He spoke by the voice of David and the Prophets.

“Seven times a day the Benedictines do the homage required of the Elders in Heaven, as described by Saint John in the Apocalypse, and represented by sculptors as playing on instruments here at Chartres.