Serapion bishop of Thmuis, in Egypt, a friend of S. Antony the Great, and a champion of S. Athanasius, wrote an epistle to the great defender of orthodoxy, and another on the death of Arius, together with treatises on the titles of the Psalms, and on ManichÆism. He is said by S. Jerome to have suffered for his zeal in the orthodox cause, under Constantius, when the Arians were in power.

S. LUPICINUS, AB. OF CONDATE.

(ABOUT A.D. 430.)

[Roman and Benedictine Martyrologies; that of Usuardus, and that attributed to Bede. Authority:—A life by a contemporary, a monk of Condate, "Ego adhuc puerulus," he says. This life is very curious from its barbarous Latin, teeming as it does with words and phrases adopted from the Burgundian language. Also a life of SS. Romanus and Lupicinus by S. Gregory of Tours, written in the 5th cent., see Feb. 28th.]

Lupicinus and his younger brother Romanus, seeking solitude, climbed the rocks among the pines of the Jura, and established themselves in the wilderness of Joux, living on wild fruits and plants. They were both young; and they soon found that it was impossible for them to maintain life on the scanty food yielded by the mountains. They therefore descended to the plains, and entered the cottage of a poor woman, and told her how they had tried to serve God in the midst of the rocks, but had found such a life insupportable. The woman sharply rebuked them for having put their hand to the plough, and then turned back, and they filled with shame, turned their faces once more to the mountains, and penetrated its recesses. And then many came to them from all quarters, and the grain and herbs they had sown and planted sprang up, and they cut down trees, and built the monastery of Condate.72 But soon the place was too strait for them, and a colony went forth, and founded Lauconne, also in the Jura, and another was established at Romainmoutier. Lupicinus was abbot, and all obeyed him. He is said by S. Gregory of Tours to have been very austere and stern in the maintenance of discipline, so that from his harshness some brethren fled, but the contemporary writer gives a very different picture of him. A story of his severity, with which the mildness of his brother contrasts pleasingly, has been related in the life of S. Romanus (Feb. 28th).

But if he could be harsh at times, at others he overflowed with gentleness.

He wore a rough garment made of the skins of beasts stitched together, and wooden shoes, or rather sandals.73 When others retired to rest after singing vespers, he retreated to his oratory, however cold the weather, meditating and dozing till the midnight office; in the quaint Latin of his biographer it is said that he entered the oratory "mÆditaturus potius quam repausaturus" (to meditate rather than to repose.)

A pretty story is told of the tender care of the abbot Lupicinus for a monk whose exaggerated fasting had brought him to such a pass that it was thought he could not live many days. This man, who was younger than Lupicinus, not content with the strict rule of the house, refused to eat and drink till after vespers, and then he would touch nothing but the crumbs which the brethren had let fall on the floor, which he collected in his palm, and moistened with a little water. The result was that he was struck down as with paralysis, and lay unable to move on his pallet, ghastly, and scarce breathing. This monk was so set on maintaining his self-imposed rule that the abbot doubted for some while how to treat him. At last when all the brethren were at work one bright spring day, he remained behind, and going to the monk's side, said, "Come, my brother, and let me carry you on my back into the little garden; you have long been shut in here in this dull cell, unable to set foot on the ground, and glad your eyes with the fresh green grass." So he set him on his back, and carried him into the garden, and spread some sheepskins on the herb, and lay the emaciated brother on it, and then lay down beside him as though he were also suffering from exhaustion and rheumatism. After a while he began to rub his arms and legs, and say, "Good God! how comforted I am by this.74 Brother, come, let me rub your back and legs and arms also, it makes them feel so much better." And when he had done this for a while, the brother, who lay half torpid, began to stretch himself a bit, and spread out his legs in the sun.

Seeing this, the abbot ran to the kitchen, and got some bits of broken bread, and then went into the cellar and sopped them in the best wine, and after that poured a little oil upon them, and came back into the garden, holding out what he had got, exclaiming, "Look! sweetest brother, away with your self-imposed severity, and doubt not it has been too hard for you, follow my example, and obey my advice," and then he gave him half of what he had prepared, eating the rest himself, to encourage the monk. So having rubbed him a little more, and sung a hymn, and said a prayer, he took him up on his back once more, and carried him back to his cell again. Next day he did precisely the same, and so on till the monk was able to totter into the garden, leaning upon him, and then he amused him and occupied him by making him pick berries. And thus, by degrees, he restored to his vigour a man who was thought to be on the brink of the grave. He lived many years longer.

There were two monks who, tired of the discipline, or offended at being set to work that displeased them, resolved to go away. They met in the oratory at night, going thither under pretence of keeping vigil, and one said to the other, "You take spade and axe, and I will carry off the coverlets, and so we shall do well where we are going." Now in a dark corner was the abbot praying, and he heard them, and he cried out, "How, my children, is this! Will ye, going away, and disturb our peace?" Then the two monks fell down dismayed at his feet, but he extending his hands, put one under each of their chins, and stooping gently, kissed them, said no one word of reproach, but betook himself to the arms of prayer to God. Then the two monks stole back, penitent and humbled, to their beds, and one remained at Condate till he died, twenty years after; but the second after a while ran away, but returned again to Lupicinus, sorrowful for what he had done, and resolved to continue with him through the rest of his life.

When Lupicinus was old, he sought king Chilperic who governed Burgundy, and who was then in Geneva.75

He went to him to plead the cause of some poor natives of the Sequanaise, who had been reduced into slavery by a subordinate potentate. This petty tyrant was one of those degenerate Romans, courtiers and oppressors, who, by flattering the new-born authority of the barbarian kings, found means of trampling on and spoiling their inferiors. He was perhaps one of those senators of Gaul whom the Burgundians had admitted in 456 to a share of the conquered soil, and Lupicinus, although of Gallo-Roman origin, seems to have been less favourably disposed towards the Roman government than that of the Barbarians. Gregory of Tours has recorded a tradition which well depicts the impression made on the popular imagination by this apparition of the monks confronted with the triumphant Barbarians. He relates that when Lupicinus crossed the threshold of the palace of Chilperic, the throne upon which the king was seated trembled, as if there had been an earthquake. Reassured at the sight of the old man clothed in skins, the Burgundian prince listened to the curious debate which arose between the oppressor and the advocate of the oppressed. "It is then thou," said the courtier to the abbot, "it is thou, old impostor, who hast already insulted the Roman power for ten years, by announcing that all this region, and its chiefs, were hastening to their ruin." "Yes, truly," answered the monk, pointing to the king, who listened, "Yes, perverse traitor, the ruin which I predicted to thee and to thy fellows, there it is. Seest thou not, degenerate man, that thy rights are destroyed by thy sins, and that the prayers of the innocent are granted? Seest thou not that the fasces and the Roman purple are compelled to bow before a foreign judge? Take heed that some unexpected guest does not come before a new tribunal to claim thy lands and thy domains." The king of the Burgundians not only justified the abbot by restoring his clients to liberty, but overwhelmed him with presents, and offered him fields, and vineyards for his abbey. Lupicinus would only accept a portion of the produce of these fields and vineyards, fearing that the sentiment of too vast a property might make his monks proud. Then the king decreed that they should be allowed every year three hundred measures of corn, three hundred measures of wine, and a hundred gold pieces for vestments; and the treasury of the Merovingian kings continued to pay these dues long after the fall of the kingdom of the Burgundians.

The old abbot was true to his profession of self-mortification to the last. As he lay a dying he asked for a drink of water. One of the brethren sweetened it, by pouring in a spoonful of honey. But the dying man, when he tasted the sweetness, turned his head away, and refused to drink.

S. ENDA, AB. OF ARAN-MORE.

(ABOUT A.D. 540.)

[Irish Martyrologies. Authority:—A fragment of the Life by Augustine MacCrodin, published by Colgan, written about 1390. The following account of the home of S. Enda, and sketch of his life, is taken from the Bishop of Ardagh's charming "Visit to Aran-more," Brown and Nolan, Dublin, 1870.]

S. Enda, whose name in Irish is written Einne and Ende, and in Latin, Endeus and Anna, was born in Louth about the middle of the fifth century, and was the only son of Conall, king of Oriel, whose territories included the modern counties of Louth, Monaghan, Armagh, and Fermanagh. Three of his sisters, Fanchea, Lochinia, and Carecha, were nuns, and Darenia, the fourth sister, was wife of Engus, king of Cashel, whose death is placed by the Four Masters in the year 489. On the death of his father, the youthful Enda was chosen to succeed him as head of the men of Oriel. The warlike spirit of the times took strong hold of the young prince's heart, and we find him at an early period of his life captivated by the love of glory, and eager to show by his military prowess that he was worthy of the royal race from which he had sprung, and of the throne which he filled. His holy sister, Fanchea, was incessant in her exertions to win for God her brother's heart, which, with all its defects, she knew to be chivalrous and pure. For a time her words of warning and entreaty remained without result; but the season of grace came soon. Enda had asked from his sister in marriage one of the royal maidens who were receiving their education in the convent which she ruled. Fanchea communicated his request to the maiden: "Make thou thy choice, whether wilt thou love Him whom I love, or this earthly bridegroom?" "Whom thou lovest," was the girl's sweet reply, "Him also will I love." She died soon after, and gave her soul to God, the Spouse whom she had chosen.

"The holy virgin," says the ancient life, covered the face of the dead girl with a veil, and going again to Enda, said to him: "Young man, come and see the maiden whom thou lovest." Then Enda with the virgin entered the chamber where was the dead girl, and the holy virgin uncovering the face of the lifeless maiden, said to him: "Now look upon the face of her whom thou didst love." And Enda cried out: "Alas! she is fair no longer, but ghastly white." "So also shalt thy face be," replied the holy virgin. And then S. Fanchea discoursed to him of the pains of hell, and of the joys of heaven, until the young man's tears began to flow. O! the wondrous mercy of God in the conversion of this man to the true faith! for even as He changed the haughty Saul into the humble Paul, so out of this worldly prince did he make a spiritual and a holy teacher and pastor of His people. For having heard the words of the holy virgin, despising the vanities of the world, he took the monk's habit and tonsure, and what the tonsure signified, he fulfilled by his actions.

After having founded a monastery in his native place, S. Enda is said to have proceeded to Rosnat or Abba, in Britain, where he remained for some time under the spiritual direction of S. Mansenus or Manchan. Thence, according to the above-mentioned life, he went to Rome, where "attentively studying the examples of the saints, and preparing himself in everything for the order of priesthood, having at length been ordained priest, he was pleasing to the most high God." He built a monastery called LÆtinum or the Place of Joy; and rightly so called, adds the life, "because therein the command of loving God and our neighbour was most faithfully carried out."

Returning to Ireland, he landed at Drogheda, and built several churches on either side of the river Boyne. He then proceeded southwards to visit his brother-in-law, Engus, king of Munster, from whom he asked the island of Aran, that he might dwell thereon. The king was first unwilling to comply with his request; not because he was ungenerous, but because he had learned from S. Patrick "not to offer to the Lord his God any lands save such as were good and fertile, and easy of access." But S. Enda declared that Aran was to be the place of his resurrection; and at length the king made an offering of the island "to God and to S. Enda," asking in return the blessing of the saint.

Having thus obtained possession of what he rightly deemed a place of singular retirement, and well suited for the rigours of a penitential life, S. Enda returned to his brethren, and conducted them in safety to the island, which was then inhabited by Pagans from the adjacent coast of Clare. He divided the island into ten parts, and built thereon ten monasteries, each under the rule of its proper superior. He chose a place for his own residence on the eastern coast, and there erected a monastery, the name and site of which is preserved to this day in the little village of Kil-eany (Kill-Enda), about a mile from Kilronan. One half of the island was assigned to this monastery.

Then began the blessed days, when the sweet odour of penance ascended to heaven from the angelic band of monks, who, under the severe rule of S. Enda, made Aran a burning light of sanctity for centuries in Western Europe. "The virginal saint from Aran Island," as Marianus O'Gorman styles S. Enda, was to them a model of all the virtues of the religious life, but, above all, he excelled in the exercise of penitential mortifications. S. Cuimin of Connor tells us that:—

"Aran," says Froude,76 "is no better than a wild rock. It is strewed over with the ruins, which may still be seen, of the old hermitages; and at their best they could have been but such places as sheep would huddle under in a storm, and shiver in the cold and wet which would pierce through the chinks of the walls.... Yes; there on that wet soil, with that dripping roof above them, was the chosen home of these poor men. Through winter frost, through rain and storm, through summer sunshine, generation after generation of them, there they lived and prayed, and at last lay down and died."

These miracles of penance were the first and immediate results of S. Enda's work in Aran.

It was in his life that these holy men had daily before them the personal realization of all they were striving after; he taught them to cherish the flinty dungeon and the dripping cave for love of the hard manger and the harder cross; he bade them dwell amid the discomforts and dreariness of their island home, because in the tabernacles of sinners the blessed majesty of God was daily outraged by the crimes of men. We cannot, indeed, describe the details of his life, for they have been hidden from human view, as it is becoming that such secrets of the Heavenly King should be hidden. But there yet survives the voice of one of those who lived with him in Aran, and in the ideal of an abbot which S. Carthage sets before us, we undoubtedly find re-produced the traits which distinguished the abbot of Aran-more, from whom S. Carthage first learned to serve God in the religious life. S. Enda was his first model of the "patience, humility, prayer, fast, and cheerful abstinence; of the steadiness, modesty, calmness that are due from a leader of religious men, whose office it is to teach in all truth, unity, forgiveness, purity, rectitude in all that is moral; whose chief works are the constant preaching of the Gospel for the instruction of all persons, and the sacrifice of the Body of the great Lord upon the holy altar."77

The fame of S. Enda's austere holiness, and of the angelical life which so many were leading in Aran under his guidance, soon spread far and wide throughout the land. Soon, the Galway fishermen, whom S. Enda had blessed, found day after day their corachs crowded with strangers—religious men, of meek eye and gentle face—seeking to cross over to the island. And thus Aran gradually came to be, as the writer of the life of S. Kieran of Clonmacnoise describes it, the home of a multitude of holy men, and the sanctuary where repose the relics of countless saints, whose names are known only to the Almighty God. "Great indeed is that island," exclaims another ancient writer, "and it is the land of the saints, for no one, save God alone, knows how many holy men lie buried therein."78

But, although it is not possible to learn the names of all the saints who were formed to holiness by S. Enda in Aran, the ancient records have preserved the names of a few at least out of that blessed multitude. The history of these men is the history of S. Enda's work on Aran. First among S. Enda's disciples must be ranked S. Kieran, the founder of Clonmacnoise, who came to Aran in his youth, and for seven years lived faithfully in the service of God, under the direction of S. Enda. "During these seven years," says the ancient life of our saint, "Kieran so diligently discharged the duties of grinding the corn, that grain in quantity sufficient to make a heap never was found in the granary of the island." Upon these humble labours the light of the future greatness of the founder of Clonmacnoise was allowed to shine in visions calling him elsewhere, but he could not bring himself to sever the happy ties that bound him to his abbot. He still longed to be under his guidance, and when recommending himself to the prayers of his brethren, he said to S. Enda, in the presence of all, "O father, take me and my charge under thy protection, that all my disciples may be thine likewise." "Not so," answered Enda, "for it is not the will of God that you should all live under my care in this scanty island." And when they had thus spoken, a cross was set up in the place, in sign of the brotherhood they had contracted between themselves, and those who were to come after them; and they said: "whosoever in after times shall break the loving bond of this our brotherhood, shall not have share in our love on earth, nor in our company in heaven."

The love which S. Enda bore towards his holy pupil, for his many and wonderful virtues, made their parting singularly painful to them both. For a time the holy abbot felt as if the angels of God were leaving Aran with Kieran, and he could find no relief for his anguish but in prayer. The sternness of religious discipline had not crushed but chastened the tenderness of an affectionate disposition in S. Enda. The entire community of the island shared the sorrow that had come on their venerable abbot. When the moment of departure was at hand, and the boat that was to bear him from Aran was spreading its sails to the breeze, Kieran came slowly down to the shore, walking between S. Enda and S. Finnian, and followed by the entire brotherhood. His tears flowed fast as he moved along, and those who accompanied him mingled their tears with his. Peter de Blois, when leaving the abbey of Croyland to return to his own country, stayed his steps seven times to look back and contemplate once again the place where he had been so happy; so, too, did Kieran's gaze linger with tenderness upon the dark hills of Aran and on the oratories where he had learned to love God, and to feel how good and joyous a thing it is to dwell with brethren whose hearts are at one with each other in God. And when the shore was reached, again he knelt to ask his father's blessing, and, entering the boat, was carried away from the Aran that he was never to see again. The monastic group stayed for a while on the rocks to follow with longing eyes the bark that was bearing from them him they loved; and when at length, bending their steps homewards, they had gone some distance from the shore, S. Enda's tears once more began to flow. "O my brethren," cried he, "good reason have I to weep, for this day has our island lost the flower and strength of religious observance." What was loss to Aran, however, was gain to Clonmacnoise, and through Clonmacnoise to the entire Irish Church.

Next among the saints of Aran comes S. Brendan. S. Finnian of Moville (March 18th) is also mentioned in the ancient life of our saint as one of S. Enda's disciples at Aran. The Irish life of S. Columbkille makes mention of the sojourn of that great saint on Aran. The deep love of S. Columba for Aran, the sorrow with which he quitted its shores for Iona, are expressed in a poem, written by him on his departure.

The ancient life of S. Enda also reckons among the inhabitants of Aran S. Finnian the elder, the founder of the great school of Clonard; S. Jarlath, the founder of the see of Tuam; S. Mac Creiche, of the race of the men of Corcomroe, who were in possession of Aran when S. Enda first went thither. The Martyrology of Donegal makes mention of S. Guigneus; the Martyrology of Ængus adds S. Papeus, S. Kevin of Glendaloch, S. Carthage of Lismore, S. Lonan Kerr, S. Nechanus, and S. Libeus, brother of S. Enda. In the midst of this holy brotherhood S. Enda died in 540 or 542.

The sight of Aran peopled by this host of saints forcibly recalls to mind that other island, where, in an age of wild and fierce passions, the arts of peace, religious learning, and the highest Christian virtues, found a sanctuary. At the beginning of the sixth century, Aran may, with truth, be styled the Lerins of the Northern seas. True, its bare flags and cold grey landscape contrast sadly with "the gushing streams, the green meadows, the luxuriant wealth of vines, the fair valleys, and the fragrant scents which," according to S. Eucherius, "made Lerins the paradise of those who dwelt thereon."79 However, its very wildness did but make it richer in those attractions so well described by S. Ambrose, which made the outlying islands so dear to the religious men of that time.80 They loved those islands, "which, as a necklace of perils, God has set upon the bosom of the sea, and in which those who would fly from the irregular pleasures of the world, may find a refuge wherein to practise austerity and save themselves from the snares of this life. In it these faithful and pious men find incentives to devotion. The mysterious sound of the billows calls for the answering sound of sacred psalmody; and the peaceful voices of holy men, mingled with the gentle murmur of the waves breaking softly on the shore rise in unison to the heavens."

On a summer's day in the year 1870, says the Bishop of Ardagh, we set sail to visit the remote Aran, which the virtues of S. Enda had changed from a Pagan isle into Aran of the Saints. And as the faint breeze bore us slowly over the waters that lay almost motionless in the summer calm, we gazed with admiration upon a scene which was but little changed since S. Enda and his pilgrim band had first looked upon it. Before us there lay stretched out the same expanse of sea, fringed on one side by the dark plains of Iar-Connaught, along which the eye travelled from the white cliffs of Barna to where the Connemara mountains, in soft blue masses, stood out in fantastic clusters against the sky. On the other side ran the Clare coastline, now retreating before the deep sea-inlets, and now breasting the Atlantic with bold promontories like that of gloomy Black-Head, or with gigantic cliffs like those of Mohir. And as the day closed, and we watched the evening breeze steal out from land, crisping the water into wavelets that rippled against the vessel's side; and as we saw the golden glory of the sunset flush with indescribable loveliness, earth, and sea, and sky, we thought how often in bygone days, the view of Aran rising, as we then saw it, out of the sunlit waves, had brought joy to the pilgrim who was journeying to find rest upon its rocky shore.

The Aran isles are three in number, named respectively, Inishmore (the large island), Inishmain (the middle island), and Inisheen (the eastern island). The eastern island is the smallest of the three, and is about two-and-a-half miles long; the middle island is three miles long; the largest is about nine miles in length, and twenty-four in circumference.

Our chief interest was naturally centred in the group of buildings which exist at Killeany, and consist of the church of S. Benignus, the church of S. Enda, the round tower of S. Enda, and the stone houses in its immediate vicinity. Our readers will have remarked that the first six churches named in Dr. Keely's list, all stood near each other, and to the north of the present village of Killeany. Out of six churches which existed here as late as 1645, four have almost entirely disappeared. They were demolished by unholy hands for the sake of materials to build the castle of Arkin.

The church known as Teglach Enda, wherein S. Enda was laid, still exists on the shore; it is in good preservation, and is a fine specimen of the single church without chancel. It is twenty-four feet in length and fourteen in breadth. All the walls now standing are by no means of an equal antiquity. The eastern gable and part of the northern side wall are the only parts belonging to S. Enda's time, the remainder of the building being the work of a later period. Around the church spreads the cemetery, now almost completely covered up by the sands, in which the body of S. Enda, and those of one hundred and fifty other saints, are interred.

On the hill side, are S. Enda's well, and altar; the latter surmounted by a rude cross. S. Enda's well, and indeed all the other wells we saw in the island, are carefully protected by the Araners; the scarcity of water rendering the possession of a well almost as precious to them as it was to the Eastern shepherds in the days of Rebecca. At a short distance to the left of the well, stands the remnant of the round tower of S. Enda. Once its height was worthy of the cluster of sacred temples which stood within the circle traversed by the shadow it projected in the changing hours; but now it is little more than thirteen feet high. An aged man who joined our group, told us that in S. Enda's time the mass was not commenced in any of the churches of the island, until the bell from S. Enda's tower announced that S. Enda himself had taken his place at the altar in his own church.

With the permission of the excellent priest who has charge of the island, we resolved, on the last morning of our stay on Aran, to celebrate mass in the ruined church of Teglach-Enda, where in the year 540 or 542, S. Enda was interred. The morning was bright and clear, and the rigid outlines of the rocks were softened by the touch of the early sunshine. The inhabitants of Killeany, exulting in the tidings that the Holy Sacrifice was once again to be offered to God near the shrine of their sainted patron, accompanied or followed us to the venerable ruins. The men, young and old, were clothed in decent black, or in white garments of home-made stuff, with sandals of undressed leather, like those of the peasants of the Abruzzi, laced round their feet; the women were attired in gay scarlet gowns and blue bodices, and all wore a look of remarkable neatness and comfort. The small roofless church was soon filled to overflowing with a decorous and devout congregation.

We can never forget the scene of that morning: the pure bright sand, covering the graves of unknown and unnumbered saints as with a robe of silver tissue; the delicate green foliage of the wild plants; on one side, the swelling hill crowned with the church of S. Benignus, and on the other the blue sea, that almost bathed the foundations of the venerable sanctuary itself; the soft balmy air that hardly stirred the ferns on the old walls; and the fresh, happy, solemn calm that reigned over all.

The temporary altar was set up under the east window, on the site where of old the altar stood; and there, in the midst of the loving and simple faithful, within the walls which had been consecrated some twelve hundred years before, over the very spot of earth where so many of the saints of Ireland lay awaiting their resurrection to glory, the solemn rite of the Christian Sacrifice was performed, and once more, as in the days of which S. Columba wrote, the angels of God came down to worship the Divine Victim in the Churches of Aran.

S. BENEDICT, AB.

(A.D. 543.)

[Roman Martyrology, Benedictine, that of Bede. Greek Menologium on March 14th. Authorities:—Life written by S. Gregory the Great, in the second book of his dialogues; S. Gregory received his information from the lips of four disciples of the holy patriarch, Constantine, Honoratus, Valentinian, and Simplicius, the two first of whom had succeeded him as abbots respectively of Monte Cassino and Subiaco. Also the Chronicon Casinense, the first three books containing the life of S. Benedict by Leo Marsicanus, B. of Ostia, a monk of Monte Casino; the fourth book was added by Paulus Diacomus. The following life has been condensed from that by M. de Montalembert in his "Monks of the West."]

S. Benedict was born in the year of our Lord 480. Europe has, perhaps, never known a more calamitous or apparently desperate period than that which reached its climax at this date. Confusion, corruption, despair, and death were everywhere; social dismemberment seemed complete. Authority, morals, laws, sciences, arts, religion herself, might have been supposed condemned to irremediable ruin. The germs of a splendid and approaching revival were still hidden from all eyes under the ruins of a crumbling world. The Church was more than ever infected by heresy, schisms, and divisions, which the obscure successors of S. Leo the Great in the Holy See endeavoured in vain to repress. In all the ancient Roman world there did not exist a prince who was not either a pagan, an Arian, or an Eutychian. The monastic institution, after having given so many doctors and saints to the Church in the East, was drifting toward that descent which it never was doomed to reascend; and even in the West, some symptoms of premature decay had already appeared.

Germany was still entirely pagan, as was also Great Britain, where the new-born faith had been stifled by the Angles and Saxons. Gaul was invaded on the north by the pagan Franks, and on the south by the Arian Burgundians. Spain was overrun and ravaged by the Visigoths, the Sueves, the Alans, and the Vandals, all Arians. The same Vandals, under the successor of Genseric, made Christian Africa desolate, by a persecution more unpitying and refined in cruelty than those of the Roman emperors. In a word, all those countries into which the first disciples of Jesus Christ carried the faith, had fallen a prey to barbarianism. The world had to be re-conquered.

Amidst this universal darkness and desolation, history directs our gaze towards those heights in the centre of Italy, and at the gates of Rome, which detach themselves from the chain of the Apennines, and extend from the ancient country of the Sabines to that of the Samnites. A single solitary was about to form there a centre of spiritual virtue, and to light it up with a splendour destined to shine over regenerated Europe for ten centuries to come.

Fifty miles to the west of Rome, among that group of hills where the Anio hollows a deep gorge, the traveller, ascending by the course of the river, reaches a basin, which opens out between two immense walls of rock, and from which a limpid stream pours from fall to fall, to a place called Subiaco. This grand and picturesque site had attracted the attention of Nero. He confined the waters of the Anio by dams, and constructed artificial lakes below, before a delicious villa, which, from its position, assumed the name of Sublaqueum, and of which some shapeless ruins remain. Four centuries after Nero, when solitude and silence had long replaced the imperial orgies, a young patrician flying from the delights and dangers of Rome, sought there a refuge with God. He had been baptized under the name of Benedictus, or the Blessed. He belonged to the illustrious Anician family; by his mother's side he was the last scion of the lords of Nursia, where he was born, as has been said, in 480. He was scarce fourteen when he resolved to renounce fortune, his family, and the happiness of this world. Leaving his old nurse, who had been the first to love him, and who alone followed him still, he plunged, in 494, into these wild gorges, and ascended those savage hills. On the way he met a monk, named Romanus, who gave him a hair shirt and a monastic habit made of skin.81 Proceeding on his ascent, and reaching the middle of the abrupt rock, which faces the south, and which overhangs the Anio, he discovered a dark cave, a sort of den, unillumined by the sun. He there took up his abode, and remained unknown to all, except the monk Romanus, who fed him with the remainder of his own scanty fare, but who, not being able to reach his cell, transmitted to him every day, at the end of a cord, a loaf and a little bell, the sound of which warned him of this sustenance which charity had provided for him.

He lived three entire years in this tomb. The shepherds who discovered him there at first took him for a wild beast, but by his discourses, and the efforts he made to instil grace and piety into their rustic souls, they recognised in him a servant of God. Temptations were not wanting to him. The allurements of voluptuousness acted so strongly on his excited senses, that he was on the point of leaving his retreat to seek after a woman whose beauty had formerly impressed him, and whose memory haunted him incessantly. But there was near his grotto a clump of thorns and briers: he took off the vestments of skins, which was his only dress, and rolled himself among them naked till his body was all one wound, but also till he had extinguished for ever the infernal fire which inflamed him even in the desert.

Seven centuries later, another saint, father of the most numerous monastic family which the church has produced after that of S. Benedict, S. Francis of Assisi, came to visit that wild site, which was worthy to rival the bare Tuscan rock, where the stigmata of the passion were imprinted on himself. He prostrated himself before the thicket of thorns which had been a triumphal bed to the masculine virtue of the patriarch of the monks, and after having bathed with his tears the soil of that glorious battle-field, he planted there two rose trees. The roses of S. Francis grew, and have survived the Benedictine briers. This garden, twice sanctified, still occupies a sort of triangular plateau, which projects upon the side of the rock, a little before and beneath the grotto which sheltered S. Benedict. The eye, confined on all sides by rocks, can survey freely only the azure of heaven. It is the last of those sacred places visited and venerated in the celebrated and unique monastery of the Iagro Speco, which forms a series of sanctuaries, built one over the other, backed by the mountain which Benedict has immortalized. Such was the hard and savage cradle of the monastic order in the West. It was from this tomb, where the delicate son of the last patricians of Rome buried himself alive, that the definite form of monastic life—that is to say, the perfection of Christian life—was born.

The solitude of the young anchorite was not long respected. The faithful in the neighbourhood, who brought him food for the body, asked the bread of life in return. The monks of a neighbouring monastery, situated near Vico Varo, obtained, by dint of importunity, his consent to become their ruler, but, soon disgusted by his austerity, they endeavoured to poison him. He made the sign of the cross over the vessel which contained the poison, and it broke as if it had been struck with a stone. He left these unworthy monks, to re-enter joyfully his beloved cavern, and to live by himself alone. But it was in vain: he soon found himself surrounded by such a multitude of disciples, that, to give them a shelter, he was compelled to found in the neighbourhood of his retreat twelve monasteries, each inhabited by twelve monks. He kept some with him, in order to direct them himself, and was thus finally raised to be the superior of a numerous community of cenobites.

Clergy and laymen, Romans and barbarians, victors and vanquished, alike flocked to him, attracted by the fame of his virtue and miracles. While the celebrated Theodoric, at the head of his Goths, up to that time invincible, destroyed the ephemeral kingdom of the Hercules, seized Rome, and overspread Italy, other Goths came to seek faith, penitence, and monastic discipline under the laws of Benedict. At his command they armed themselves with axes and hatchets, and employed their robust strength in rooting out the brushwood and clearing the soil, which, since the time of Nero, had again become a wilderness. The Italian painters of the great ages of art have left us many representations of the legend told by S. Gregory, in which S. Benedict restores to a Goth who had become a convert at Subiaco, the tool which that zealous but unskilled workman had dropped to the bottom of the lake, and which the abbot miraculously brought forth. "Take thy tool," said Benedict to the barbarian woodcutter,—"take it, work, and be comforted." Symbolical words, in which we find an abridgment of the precepts and examples lavished by the monastic order on so many generations of conquering races: Ecce labora.

Beside these barbarians already occupied in restoring the cultivation of that Italian soil which their brethren in arms still wasted, were many children of the Roman nobility, whom their fathers had confided to Benedict to be trained to the service of God. Among these young patricians are two whose names are celebrated in Benedictine annals: Maur, whom the abbot Benedict made his own coadjutor; and Placidus, whose father was lord of the manor of Subiaco, which did not prevent his son from rendering menial services to the community, such as drawing water from the lake of Nero. The weight of his pitcher one day overbalanced him, and he fell into the lake. We shall leave Bossuet to tell the rest, in his panegyric, delivered twelve centuries afterwards before the sons of the founder of Subiaco:—

"S. Benedict ordered S. Maur, his faithful disciple, to run quickly and draw the child out. At the word of his master, Maur went away without hesitation, ... and full of confidence in the order he had received, walked upon the water with as much security as upon the earth, and drew Placidus from the whirlpool, which would have swallowed him up. To what shall I attribute so great a miracle, whether to the virtue of the obedience or to that of the commandment? A doubtful question, says S. Gregory, between S. Benedict and S. Maur. But let us say, to decide it, that the obedience had grace to accomplish the command, and that the command had grace to give efficacy to the obedience. Walk, my fathers, upon the waves with the help of obedience; you shall find solid support amid the inconstancy of human things. The waves shall have no power to overthrow you, nor the depths to swallow you up; you shall remain immovable, as if all was firm under your feet, and issue forth victorious."

However, Benedict had the ordinary fate of great men and saints. The great number of conversions worked by the example and fame of his austerity, awakened a homicidal envy against him. A wicked priest of the neighbourhood attempted first to decry and then poison him. Being unsuccessful in both, he endeavoured at least to injure him in the object of his most tender solicitude—in the souls of his young disciples. For that purpose he sent, even into the garden of the monastery, where Benedict dwelt, and where the monks laboured, seven wretched women, whose gestures, sports, and shameful nudity, were designed to tempt the young monks to certain fall. When Benedict, from the threshold of his cell, perceived these shameless creatures, he despaired of his work; he acknowledged that the interest of his beloved children constrained him to disarm so cruel an enmity by retreat. He appointed superiors to the twelve monasteries which he had founded, and, taking with him a small number of disciples, he left for ever the wild gorges of Subiaco, where he had lived for thirty-five years.

Without withdrawing from the mountainous region which extends along the western side of the Apennines, Benedict directed his steps toward the south, along the Abruzzi, and penetrated into that land of labour, the name of which seems naturally suited to a soil destined to be the cradle of the most laborious men whom the world has known. He ended his journey in a scene very different from that of Subiaco, but of incomparable grandeur and majesty. There upon the boundaries of Sammim and Campania, in the centre of a large basin, half-surrounded by abrupt and picturesque heights, rises a scarped and isolated hill, the vast and rounded summit of which overlooks the course of the Liris near its fountain head, and the undulating plain which extends south towards the shores of the Mediterranean, and the narrow valleys which, towards the north, the east, and the west, lost themselves in the lines of the mountainous horizon. This is Monte Cassino.

It was here, amidst this solemn nature, and upon that predestinated height, that the patriarch of the monks of the west founded the capital of the monastic order. He found paganism still surviving there. Two hundred years after Constantine, in the heart of Christendom, and so near Rome, there still existed a very ancient temple of Apollo, and a sacred wood, where a multitude of peasants sacrificed to the gods and demons. Benedict preached the faith of Christ to these forgotten people; he persuaded them to cut down the wood, to overthrow the temple and the idol.

Upon these remains Benedict built two oratories, one dedicated to S. John the Baptist, the first solitary of the new faith; the other to S. Martin, the great monk-bishop, whose ascetic and priestly life had edified Gaul, and reached as far as Italy.

Round these chapels rose the monastery which was to become the most powerful and celebrated in the Catholic universe; celebrated especially because there Benedict wrote his rule, and at the same time formed the type which was to serve as a model to innumerable communities submitted to that sovereign code. It is for this reason that emulous pontiffs, princes, and nations have praised, endowed, and visited the sanctuary where monastic religion, according to the expression of Pope Urban II., "flowed from the heart of Benedict as from a fountain-head of Paradise."

Benedict ended his life at Monte Cassino, where he lived for fourteen years, occupied, in the first place, with extirpating from the surrounding country the remnants of paganism, afterwards in building his monastery by the hands of his disciples, in cultivating the arid sides of his mountain, and the devastated plains around, but above all, in extending to all who approached him the benefits of the law of God, practised with a fervour and charity which none have surpassed. Although he had never been invested with the priestly character, his life at Monte Cassino was rather that of a missionary and apostle than of a solitary. He was, notwithstanding, the vigilant head of a community which flourished and increased more and more. Accustomed to subdue himself in everything, and to struggle with the infernal spirits, whose temptations and appearances were not wanting to him more than to the ancient fathers of the desert, he had acquired the gift of reading souls, and discerning their most secret thoughts. He used this faculty not only to direct the young monks, who always gathered in such numbers round him, in their studies and the labours of agriculture and building which he shared with them; but even in the distant journeys on which they were sometimes sent, he followed them by a spiritual observation, discovered their least failings, reprimanded them on their return, and bound them in everything to a strict fulfilment of the rule which they had accepted. He exacted from all, the obedience, sincerity, and austerely regulated life of which he himself gave the first example.

Many young men of rich and noble families came here, as at Subiaco, to put themselves under his direction, or were confided to him by their parents. They laboured with the other brethren in the cultivation of the soil and the building of the monastery, and were bound to all the services imposed by the rule. Some of the young nobles rebelled in secret against that equality. Among these, according to the narrative of S. Gregory, was the son of a defender—that is to say, of the first magistrate of a town or province. One evening, it being his turn to light the Abbot Benedict at supper, while he held the candlestick before the abbotial table, his pride rose within him, and he said to himself, "What is this man that I should thus stand before him while he eats, with a candle in my hand like a slave? Am I then made to be his slave?" Immediately Benedict, as if he had heard him, reproved him sharply for that movement of pride, gave the candle to another, and sent him back to his cell, dismayed to find himself at once discovered and restrained in his most secret thoughts. It was then that the great legislator inaugurated in his new-formed cloister that alliance of aristocratic races with the Benedictine Order which we shall shall have many generous and fruitful examples to quote.

He bound all—nobles and plebians, young and old, rich and poor—under the same discipline. But he would have excess or violence in nothing, and when he was told of a solitary in the neighbouring mountain, who, not content with shutting himself up in a narrow cave, had attached to his foot a chain, the other end of which was fixed in a rock, so that he could not move beyond the length of this chain, Benedict sent to tell him to break it, in these words, "If thou art truly a servant of God, confine thyself not with a chain of iron, but with the chain of Christ."

And extending his solicitude and authority over the surrounding populations, he did not content himself with preaching eloquently to them the true faith, but also healed the sick, the lepers and the possessed, provided for all the necessities of the soul and body, paid the debts of honest men oppressed by their creditors, and distributed in incessant alms the provisions of corn, wine, and linen which were sent to him by the rich Christians of the neighbourhood.

A great famine having afflicted Campania in 539, he distributed to the poor all the provisions of the monastery, so that one day there remained only five loaves to feed all the community. The monks were dismayed and melancholy: Benedict reproached them with their cowardice. "You have not enough to-day," he said to them, "but you shall have too much to-morrow." And accordingly they found next morning at the gates of the monastery two hundred bushels of flour, bestowed by some unknown hand. Thus were established the foundations of that traditional and unbounded munificence to which his spiritual descendants have remained unalterably faithful, and which was the law and glory of his existence.

So much sympathy for the poor naturally inspired them with a blind confidence in him. One day, when he had gone out with the brethren to labour in the fields, a peasant, distracted with grief, and bearing in his arms the body of his dead son, came to the monastery and demanded to see Father Benedict. When he was told that Benedict was in the fields with the brethren, he threw down his son's body before the door, and, in the transport of his grief, ran at full speed to seek the saint. He met him returning from his work, and from the moment he perceived him, began to cry, "Restore me my son!" Benedict stopped and asked "Have I carried him away?" The peasant answered "He is dead; come and raise him up." Benedict was grieved by these words, and said, "Go home my friend this is not a work for us; this belongs to the holy apostles. Why do you come to impose upon us so tremendous a burden?" But the father persisted, and swore in his passionate distress that he would not go till the saint had raised up his son. The abbot asked him where his son was. "His body" said he "is at the door of the monastery." Benedict, when he arrived there, fell on his knees, and then laid himself down, as Elijah did in the house of the widow of Sarepta, upon the body of the child, and rising up, extended his hands to heaven, praying thus; "Lord look not upon my sins but on the faith of this man, and restore to the body the soul Thou hast taken away from it." Scarcely was his prayer ended, when all present perceived that the whole body of the child trembled. Benedict took him by the hand, and restored him to his father full of life and health.

His virtue, his fame, the supernatural power which was more and more visible in his whole life, made him the natural protector of the poor husbandmen against the violence and rapine of the new masters of Italy. The great Theodoric had organized an energetic and protective government, but he dishonoured the end of his reign by persecution and cruelty; and since his death barbarism had regained all its ancient ascendancy among the Goths. The rural population groaned under the yoke of these rude oppressors, doubly exasperated, as Barbarians and as Arians against the Italian Catholics. To Benedict, the Roman patrician, who had become a serf of God, belonged the noble office of drawing towards each other the Italians and Barbarians, two races cruelly divided by religion, fortune, language, and manners, whose mutual hatred was embittered by so many catastrophes inflicted by the one, and suffered by the other, since the time of Alaric. The founder of Monte Cassino stood between the victors and the vanquished like an all-powerful moderator and inflexible judge. The facts which we are about to relate, according to the narrative of S. Gregory, could be told throughout all Italy, and, spreading from cottage to cottage, would bring unthought of hope and consolation into the hearts of the oppressed, and establish the popularity of Benedict and his order on an immortal foundation in the memory of the people.

It has been seen that there were already Goths among the monks at Subiaco, and how they were employed in reclaiming the soil which their fathers had laid waste. But there were others who, inflamed by heresy, professed a hatred of all that was orthodox and belonged to monastic life. One especially, named Galla, traversed the country panting with rage and cupidity, and made a sport of slaying the priests and monks who fell under his power, and spoiling and torturing the people to extort from them the little that they had remaining. An unfortunate peasant, exhausted by the torments inflicted upon him by the pitiless Goth, conceived the idea of bringing them to an end by declaring that he had confided all that he had to the keeping of Benedict, a servant of God; upon which Galla stopped the torture of the peasant, but, binding his arms with ropes, and thrusting him in front of his own horse, ordered him to go before and show the way to the house of this Benedict who had defrauded him of his expected prey. Both pursued thus the way to Monte Cassino; the peasant on foot, with his hands tied behind his back, urged on by the blows and taunts of the Goth, who followed on horseback, an image only too faithful of the two races which unhappy Italy enclosed within her distracted bosom, and which were to be judged and reconciled by the unarmed majesty of monastic goodness. When they had reached the summit of the mountain they perceived the abbot seated alone, reading at the door of his monastery. "Behold," said the prisoner turning to his tyrant, "there is the Father Benedict of whom I told thee." The Goth, believing that here, or elsewhere, he should be able to make his way by terror, immediately called out with a furious tone to the monk. "Rise up, rise up, and restore quickly what thou hast received from this peasant." At these words the man of God raised his eyes from his book, and, without speaking, slowly turned his gaze first upon the Barbarian on horseback, and then upon the husbandman bound, and bowed down by his cords. Under the light of that powerful gaze the cords which tied his poor arms loosed of themselves, and the innocent victim stood erect and free, while the ferocious Galla, falling on the ground, trembling, and beside himself, remained at the feet of Benedict, begging the saint to pray for him. Without interrupting his reading, Benedict called his brethren, and directed them to carry the fainting Barbarian into the monastery, and give him some blessed bread, and, when he had come to himself, the abbot represented to him the extravagance, injustice, and cruelty of his conduct, and exhorted him to change it for the future. The Goth was completely subdued, and no longer dared to ask anything of the labourer whom the mere glance of the monk had delivered from his bonds.

March 21.