“To both,” says Bossuet; “the obedience had grace to accomplish the command, and the command had grace to give efficacy to the obedience.” St. Gregory gives us a beautiful picture of St. Benedict’s loving training of these two predestined souls. He kept them always near him, and would walk along the woody banks of the Anio leaning on Maurus and leading Placidus by the hand, discoursing so wisely and yet so clearly that the appeal to the more mature intelligence of the one was as convincing as to the childlike mind of the other. They witnessed his many miracles trembled at the punishments that fell on some unfaithful members of the community, and stored up all his words in their hearts—Placidus to be the Apostle of Sicily and the first martyr of the Order, Maurus to become the founder of the religious life in France, where he died at the age of seventy, after having, as the Breviary puts it, “seen already more than one hundred of his spiritual children precede him to heaven.” Those first years at Subiaco were very happy and consoling ones for St. Benedict, but wicked men, some envious of his fame, some the open enemies of all virtue, tried by all means in their power to injure him and corrupt his followers. He took no notice of their calumnies, was unmoved by the attempt of one wretch to poison him; as long as he only was attacked he went calmly on his way. But when the conspirators sent a crowd of abandoned women to invade the garden where the monks were working, he felt the time had come when he should depart and draw the attacks away from his beloved disciples. So, having set all things in order and adjured the mountain community to be faithful to its vows, he travelled southwards, surely with a heavy heart, and did not pause till he had put nearly a hundred miles between himself and his beloved retreat at Subiaco. About eighty-five miles from Rome, where the ever-capricious Apennines sink to a rounded plain and rise in its centre in a natural fortress of rock, there stood, in Roman times, the little town of Cassinum, once the home of Varrus, whom Cicero called “sanctissimus et integerrimus,” one of those who served God without knowing Him. The place was in ruins when St. Benedict reached it, but he cared nothing for that; what arrested him was the sight of the poor country people climbing the hill to sacrifice to Apollo in the temple on the summit. Pagans yet! He stayed to teach them Christianity, and very soon the temple and grove of Apollo gave place to a church and monastery—the most famous in the world, the monastery of Monte Cassino.