Next, let us form the list of your tutor nations, in whom, it generally pleases you to look at nothing but the corruptions.  If we could get into the habit of thinking more of our own corruptions and more of their virtues, we should have a better chance of learning the true laws alike of art and destiny.  But, the safest way of all, is to assure ourselves that true knowledge of any thing or any creature is only of the good of it; that its nature and life are in that, and that what is diseased,—­that is to say, unnatural and mortal,—­you must cut away from it in contemplation, as you would in surgery.

Of the six tutor nations, two, the Tuscan and Arab, have no effect on early Christian England.  But the Roman, Greek, Syrian, and Egyptian act together from the earliest times; you are to study the influence of Rome upon England in Agricola, Constantius, St. Benedict, and St. Gregory; of Greece upon England in the artists of Byzantium and Ravenna; of Syria and Egypt upon England in St. Jerome, St. Augustine, St. Chrysostom, and St. Athanase.

St. Jerome, in central Bethlehem; St. Augustine, Carthaginian by birth, in truth a converted Tyrian, Athanase, Egyptian, symmetric and fixed as an Egyptian aisle; Chrysostom, golden mouth of all; these are, indeed, every one teachers of all the western world, but St. Augustine especially of lay, as distinguished from monastic, Christianity to the Franks, and finally to us.  His rule, expanded into the treatise of the City of God, is taken for guide of life and policy by Charlemagne, and becomes certainly the fountain of Evangelical Christianity, distinctively so called, (and broadly the lay Christianity of Europe, since, in the purest form of it, that is to say, the most merciful, charitable, variously applicable, kindly wise.) The greatest type of it, as far as I know, St. Martin of Tours, whose character is sketched, I think in the main rightly, in the Bible of Amiens; and you may bind together your thoughts of its course by remembering that Alcuin, born at York, dies in the Abbey of St. Martin, at Tours; that as St. Augustine was in his writings Charlemagne’s Evangelist in faith, Alcuin was, in living presence, his master in rhetoric, logic, and astronomy, with the other physical sciences.

A hundred years later than St. Augustine, comes the rule of St. Benedict—­the Monastic rule, virtually, of European Christianity, ever since—­and theologically the Law of Works, as distinguished from the Law of Faith.  St. Augustine and all the disciples of St. Augustine tell Christians what they should feel and think:  St. Benedict and all the disciples of St. Benedict tell Christians what they should say and do.

In the briefest, but also the perfectest distinction, the disciples of St. Augustine are those who open the door to Christ—­“If any man hear my voice”; but the Benedictines those to whom Christ opens the door—­“To him that knocketh it shall be opened.”