It was not merely as the inspired Word of God that the Holy Scriptures were thus valued; but in the schools of which we are speaking they held the place of the great Christian classic. They were not a mere dry repertory of texts illustrative of doctrine, but they formed at once the favourite book of prayer, of meditation, of spiritual reading, and of recreative delight. Pondered on day and night, with all their hidden meaning laid open by the comments of the Fathers, what a treasury of wisdom, what a fountain of poesy was there! The very language of Scripture wonderfully harmonised with the daily monastic life, so patriarchal in its simplicity, its noble toils, and its humble duties of the shepherd, the husbandman, and the vinedresser. It harmonised with the scenes in the midst of which they lived, the mountains, and the wooded valleys, the fields standing thick with corn, the wilderness in its untrampled beauty, where rose up “the verdure of the reed and the bulrush,” and where the myrtle and the olive-tree grew by the running waters. It harmonised with their deep sympathy with the Beautiful, their intimate acquaintance with Nature in all her aspects, by day or by night, so familiar to the eyes of those who sanctified all hours by prayer, and to whom “the outgoings of the morning and of the evening were made joyful,” by the Matins and Vesper psalmody. But chiefly and above all, it harmonised with that thirst that devoured their souls for the true and living God; a thirst which made them weary of all things in which He was not to be found, which made all things sweet in which He had His part; which led them by a strange inspired ingenuity to turn all things to Him, to Christianise every study, to divinise every act; which taught them to create new arts to deck His sanctuary, new sciences to minister to His praise--a thirst which, unslaked by the choicest fountains of Gentile antiquity, drank deep and refreshing draughts at those streams of sacred poetry, out of which they framed the language of their daily Office, and which moulded the very fashion of their daily speech.