masses knew too much; that they could contrast too easily, and too freely, the fallen and profligate monks of the 15th and 16th centuries, with those Bible examples, which the old monks of centuries before had taught their forefathers. Then the clergy tried to keep from the laity, because it testified against themselves, the very book which centuries before they had taught them to love and know too well. In a word, the old monk missionary taught all he knew to all who would learn, just as our best modern missionaries do; and was loved, and obeyed, and looked on as a superior being, as they are. Of course he did not know how far civilization would extend. He could not foretell railroads and electric telegraphs, any more than he could political economy, or sanitary science. But the best that he knew, he taught--and did also, working with his own hands. He was faithful in a few things, and God made him ruler over many things. For out of those monasteries sprang--what did not spring? They restored again and again sound law and just government, when the good old Teutonic laws, and the Roman law also, was trampled underfoot amid the lawless strife of ambition and fury. Under their shadow sprang up the towns with their corporate rights, their middle classes, their artizan classes. They were the physicians, the alms-givers, the relieving officers, the schoolmasters of the middle-age world. They first taught us the great principle of the division of labour, to which we owe, at this moment, that England is what she is, instead of being covered with a horde of peasants, each making and producing everything for himself, and starving each upon his rood of ground. They transcribed or composed all the books of the then world; many of them spent their lives in doing nothing but writing; and the number of books, even of those to be found in single monasteries, considering the tedious labour of copying, is altogether astonishing. They preserved to us the treasures of classical antiquity. They discovered for us the germs of all our modern inventions. They brought in from abroad arts and new knowledge; and while they taught men to know that they had a common humanity, a common Father in heaven taught them also to profit by each other's wisdom instead of remaining in isolated ignorance. They, too, were the great witnesses against feudal caste. With them was neither high-born nor low-born, rich nor poor: worth was their only test; the meanest serf entering there might become the lord of knights and vassals, the counsellor of kings and princes. Men may talk of democracy--those old monasteries were the most democratic institutions the world had ever till then seen. 'A man's a man for a' that,' was not only talked of in them, but carried out in practice--only not in anarchy, and as a cloak for licentiousness: but under those safeguards of strict discipline, and almost military order, without which