THE INFLUENCE OF THE MONKS IN 



AGRICULTURE 



I have chosen for my subject this afternoon "The influ- 

 ence of the monks in agriculture," — the influence of men 

 who, taking their lives in their hands, flung themselves into 

 the wild forests and abandoned wastes of Europe and the 

 remoter East, and wrought a work which, so far as we can 

 judge, could have been wrought in no other way; "for it 

 was done by men who gave up all that makes life dear and 

 worth the living, for the sake of being good themselves and 

 making others good." They were the pioneers of a physical, 

 no less than a moral, civilization. Never were instruments 

 less conscious of the high ends they were serving, and never 

 were high ends more rapidly or more effectually achieved. 

 Apostles of the Lord, they pushed out into the midst of 

 tribes only wilder and more savage than the country they 

 inhabited, determined to bring them within the fold. But 

 the instinct of self-preservation compelled them first to turn 

 aside to reclaim and till the soil, to construct houses, to pro- 

 vide themselves with the necessities of life, to practise the 

 arts and sciences in order that they might live. And so, 

 ministering to their bodily wants, they ended by forcing 

 upon their barbaric neighbors, first, civilization, and then 

 Christianity. Kingsley, in his spirited way, tells us: "They 

 accepted the lowest and commonest facts of the peasant's 

 life. They outdid him in helplessness and loneliness, in 

 hunger and dirt and slavery, and then said : 'Among all these 



