“How perfectly,” says Dean Milman, “the whole atmosphere was then impregnated with an inexhaustible yearning for the supernatural, appears from the ardour with which the monastic passions were indulged at the earliest age. Children were nursed and trained to expect at every instant more than human interferences; their young energies had ever before them examples of asceticism, to which it was the glory, the true felicity of life, to aspire. The thoughtful child had all his mind thus preoccupied. He was early, it might almost seem intuitively, trained to this course of life; wherever there was gentleness, modesty, the timidity of young passion, repugnance to vice, an imaginative temperament, a consciousness of unfitness to wrestle with the rough realities of life, the way lay invitingly open—the difficult, it is true, and painful, but direct and unerring way to heaven.” Such a life is not needed now-a-days. What is now required is one like that of Angela, in Sir Walter Besant’s “All Sorts and Conditions of Men,” who will plunge into the sordid wretchedness of the slums of our great cities, and labour there to bring happiness to the dull lives of the toilers—who will labour to ameliorate the condition of those that are the slaves of our nineteenth-century civilisation. What we require—what God requires—are social reformers, men and women, who in place of living selfish lives of amusement and luxury, will devote themselves to helping to raise those who are down, who will seek happiness, not in pampering self, but in making others happy. After a while crowds of disciples flocked to Benedict, and then he left Subiaco for Monte Cassino, which was thenceforth to be the capital of monastic life. Strange it may appear, but it was true, that Benedict found the people round Cassino still pagans, offering sacrifices in a temple to Apollo on the height where he chose to plant his settlement. “In old days, That mountain, at whose side Cassino rests, Was, on its height, frequented by a race Deceived and ill-disposed; and I it was, Who thither carried first the name of Him, Who brought the soul-subliming truth to man, And such a speeding grace shone over me, That from their impious worship I reclaim’d The dwellers round about.”—Dante, _Par._ xxii.