created at once a contrast and a remedy.”(63) Prior Vaughan, in his brilliant lifelike picture of mediævalism, _S. Thomas of Aquin_, perpetually refers to the ruling principle of monasticism: “To omit mention of the Benedictine principle would be to manifest great ignorance of the action of the highest form of truth upon mankind. The mastership of authority and reverence, springing out of the school of _quies_, did not cease to exert a considerable influence even after the dominant power of the monastic body had nearly disappeared.”(64) Elsewhere we read: “There was nothing of the sophist or logician in those sweet and venerable countenances, the unruffled beauty of which is so often dwelt upon by their biographers.... One of the marks of the age is the absence of the disputatious spirit, which, if it diminishes their rank (that of the monastic thinkers) in the world of letters, forms the charm of their characters as men. The real spirit of the age was one of reverence for tradition.”(65) The foresight of the monk‐teachers of the earlier middle ages is no less remarkable than their holiness. Everywhere they fostered the native idiom, and labored to reduce it to an intelligible grammar. The national and patriotic feeling thus awakened in the centres of learning must needs have endeared them to, and more closely linked them with, the intellectual progress of the people they instructed. A modern author observes that “Bede’s words are evidence that the establishment of the Teutonic nations on the ruins of the Roman Empire did not _barbarize_ knowledge. He collected and taught more natural truths than any Roman writer had yet accomplished, and his works display an advance, not a retrogression, in science.” Indeed, natural science seems to have been from the first a peculiarly monastic pursuit. The great names of Bede, Gerbert, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon are as a mighty chain from century to century, leading up to the discoveries of Galileo, Newton, Arago, and Humboldt; while in S. Brendan we have a bold precursor of Columbus.