Before the monkish order had been in existence a century, in the East as in the West, the monastic regulations underwent considerable relaxation. The monks having become part of the clerical hierarchy (by force of circumstances, for there was often a deficiency of clergy), took precedence of the latter; their abbots, called _archimandrites_ in the Eastern Church, were raised to the priesthood and to the episcopate; they even took part in councils, though these functions and duties interfered with their cenobitic life. This manifest infraction of the primitive discipline, while it lowered the moral position of the monks, rather increased than otherwise their social influence, and gave them greater weight in the world. Their piety, too, was only temporarily distracted from its original purpose, for men of note like St. Honoratus, St. Maximus, St. Hilary, St. Dalmatius, the two brothers Romanus and Lupicius, maintained the true tradition of monkish life; and the famous abbeys of Lérins and Mount Jura were built. The ascetics of Constantinople, too, were spoken of in high terms, as keeping up a perpetual psalmody (401–405). In Palestine, not far from Jerusalem, a multitude of hermits, under the guidance of St. Euthymius, practised the most rigorous abstinence. In Africa, St. Fulgentius, exiled by the Arians, was the promoter of regular observances--that is, he preached strict obedience to monastic rule (501–523); while in the West there were founded, in the midst of the Romagnol Alps, in the towns of Arles and St. Maurice d’Agaune, three model monasteries, the first superintendents of which were St. Hilary, St. Cæsarius, and St. Severinus; and its principal benefactors, Theodoric, King of the Goths, Theodoric the Great, and Sigismund, King of Burgundy (504–522). In the monastery of Kildare, governed by St. Bridget, and in the monastery founded by St. Colomba, in Ireland, which was afterwards so justly called the _Isle of Saints_, the teaching of Christian art, of the liturgy, of ecclesiastical lore and profane literature, was unequalled in its perfection, and the fame of it reached even to Gaul. [Illustration: Fig. 239.--History of St. Benedict.--As his disciples were attempting to put a stone in place for the construction of their chapel, the devil placed himself upon it, and the united efforts of several persons failed to dislodge him; but St. Benedict having blessed the stone, the devil took flight.--From a Fresco by Spinello d’Arezzo (1390), in the Church of San Miniato, near Florence.]