The western mind therefore insisted upon a modification of the monastic institution along more reasonable lines, and credit for this innovation goes to a native of the town of Nursia in the Apennine mountains. His name was Benedict and he is invariably spoken of as Saint Benedict. His parents had sent him to Rome to be educated, but the city had filled his Christian soul with horror and he had fled to the village of Subiaco in the Abruzzi mountains to the deserted ruins of an old country palace that once upon a time had belonged to the Emperor Nero. There he had lived for three years in complete solitude. Then the fame of his great virtue began to spread throughout the countryside and the number of those who wished to be near him was soon so great that he had enough recruits for a dozen full-fledged monasteries. He therefore retired from his dungeon and became the lawgiver of European monasticism. First of all he drew up a constitution. In every detail it showed the influence of Benedict’s Roman origin. The monks who swore to obey his rules could not look forward to a life of idleness. Those hours which they did not devote to prayer and meditation were to be filled with work in the fields. If they were too old for farm work, they were expected to teach the young how to become good Christians and useful citizens and so well did they acquit themselves of this task that the Benedictine monasteries for almost a thousand years had a monopoly of education and were allowed to train most of the young men of exceptional ability during the greater part of the Middle Ages. In return for their labors, the monks were decently clothed, received a sufficient amount of eatable food and were given a bed upon which they could sleep the two or three hours of each day that were not devoted to work or to prayer. But most important, from an historical point of view, was the fact that the monks ceased to be laymen who had merely run away from this world and their obligations to prepare their souls for the hereafter. They became the servants of God. They were obliged to qualify for their new dignity by a long and most painful period of probation and furthermore they were expected to take a direct and active part in spreading the power and the glory of the kingdom of God. The first elementary missionary work among the heathen of Europe had already been done. But lest the good accomplished by the apostles come to naught, the labors of the individual preachers must be followed up by the organized effort of permanent settlers and administrators. The monks now carried their spade and their ax and their prayer-book into the wilderness of Germany and Scandinavia and Russia and far-away Iceland. They plowed and they harvested and they preached and they taught school and brought unto those distant lands the first rudimentary elements of a civilization which most people only knew by hearsay.