Of these monastic centres, Lerins is perhaps the oldest. Founded in 410, on an island of the Mediterranean near the coast of France, it became “another Thebaid, a celebrated school of theology and Christian philosophy, a citadel inaccessible to the works of barbarism, and an asylum for literature and science which had fled from Italy on the invasion of the Goths.”(35) All France sought its bishops from this holy and learned isle. Among its great scholars was Vincent of Lerins, the first controversialist of his time, and the originator of the celebrated formula: _Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditum est_. We may be pardoned for extending our notice of him, since the words he uses on the progress of the church are so singularly appropriate to our own times and problems. Having established the unchangeableness of Catholic doctrine, he goes on to say: “Shall there, then, be no progress in the church of Christ? There shall be progress, and even great progress, ... but it will be _progress_ and _not change_. With the growth of ages there must necessarily be a growth of intelligence, of wisdom, and of knowledge, for each man as for all the church. But the religion of souls must imitate the progress of the human form, which, in developing and growing in years, never ceases to be the same in the maturity of age as in the flower of youth.”(36) Had the monk of Lerins foreknown the aberrations of the doctor of Munich, he could not have better refuted the latest heresy of our own day. S. Lupus of Troyes, who arrested Attila at the gates of his episcopal city, and successfully combated the Pelagian heresy in England; S. Cesarius of Arles, who was successively persecuted and finally reinstated by two barbarian kings, and who gave his sister Cesaria a rule for her nuns which was adopted by Queen Radegundes for her immense monastery of Poictiers; Salvian, whose eloquence was likened to that of S. Augustine, were all monks of Lerins. S. Cesarius has well epitomized the training of this great and holy school when he says: “It is she who nourishes those illustrious monks who are sent into all provinces of Gaul as bishops. When they arrive, they are children; when they go out, they are fathers. She receives them as recruits, she sends them forth kings.”(37) As late as 1537, we find on the list of the commission appointed by Pope Paul III. to draw up the preliminaries of the Council of Trent, and especially to point out and correct the abuses of secular training and paganized art, the name of Gregory Cortese, Abbot of Lerins.(38) But we must hasten on to other foundations of a reputation and influence as world‐wide as that of the Mediterranean Abbey.