Moreover, in order to connect the whole system of justice with religion, in order to teach the people in the most efficacious manner possible that the Church desires justice above all things, he added to the sentence of the judge the penance of the Church. This subjection of the law to the Church would seem intolerable to us. At that time it was necessary to make a rude, ignorant, and violent people understand that religion must be more than a creed: that it must have a practical and restraining side; a man who was made to understand that an offence against the law was an offence against the Church which would be punished by the latter as well as by the secular judge, was made for the first time to feel the reality of the Church. This firm determination to link the Divine Law and the Human Law: this firm reliance on the Divine Law as the foundation of all law: is to me the most characteristic point in the whole of Alfred’s work. The view—the intention—the purpose of King Alfred are summed up, without intention, by the poet whom I have already quoted. The following words of Rudyard Kipling might be the very words of Alfred: they breathe his very spirit—they might be, I say, the very words spoken by Alfred: Keep ye the law: be swift in all obedience— Clear the land of evil: drive the road and bridge the ford. Make ye sure to each his own That he reap where he hath sown: By the Peace among our Peoples let men know we serve the Lord! Alfred endeavoured to rebuild the monasteries. He then made the discovery that the old passion for the monastic life was gone: he could get no one to go into them. Forty years of a life and death struggle had killed the desire for the cloister: the people had learned to love action better than seclusion—their ideal was now the soldier, not the monk. A great gain for the people, which never afterwards returned to its ancient love of the Rule and the Hood.