The era-making movements in religion all began outside our territorial limits at Monte Cassino, Cluny, Clairveaux, but it was through St. Benedict of Aniane that Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle effected his regeneration of the Church and his initiation of a new Christian education and culture; St. Bruno, of Cologne, sometime head of the cathedral school of Reims, was the founder of the Order of Carthusians; St. Chrodegang, Archbishop of Metz, brought into existence the Canons Regular of St. Augustine, who introduced into cathedral chapters the order and discipline of monasticism; St. Norbert, of Xanten, created the Order of Prémontré, one of the most beneficent and beautiful of the religious brotherhoods of the Middle Ages, while the “Imitation of Christ,” the most purely spiritual and devotional work of the time, was the product of Thomas à Kempis, an obscure monk of the Netherlands. In the development of Christian mysticism the Rhine valley stands pre-eminent, though the greatest of all those of this school of combined thought and vision was Hugh of St. Victor, of the monastery of Augustinian Canons in Paris, on the banks of the Seine, where now is the Jardin des Plantes, The ancient tradition is that he was born near Ypres, though recent researches seem to indicate that he may have been a son of the Count of Blankenburg in Saxony. In any case, he was the great expositor of sacramental religion and philosophy as Charlemagne’s Radbertus Paschasus was the great defender of the true doctrine of Transubstantiation. If, indeed, Hugh of St. Victor was a product of Flanders, then the credit goes there of having given birth to one of the noblest and most penetrating minds the world has known, one that ranks with that greatest pure intellect of all time, St. Thomas Aquinas.