ADDRESSES 231 



a garden; the garden stretches out into fields of waving 

 grain; the hills are clothed with vines, the valleys bowered 

 in fruit trees. 



Opening their doors to all, receiving under their shelter 

 and protection the oppressed, the weak, the criminal, the 

 slave, the sin-sick soul, weary of this life and despairing of 

 another, the mourner and the comfortless, it frequently 

 happened that the inmates of these cloisters, those attached 

 to one community and under one jurisdiction, numbered 

 thousands. Lecky tells us that in one city on the Nile 

 there were twenty thousand monks and ten thousand 

 nuns, — the religious far outnumbering the other classes of 

 society. In England and Ireland these monastic commu- 

 nities assumed a peculiar form. Kings, followed by their 

 entire tribe, presented themselves at the baptismal font and 

 came under religious rule; and frequently these kings were 

 chosen abbots, and as in their worldly life they had ruled 

 their subjects, so in their spiritual life they continued to be 

 their recognized head and leader. To such an extent was 

 this carried, that in England in the course of a single cen- 

 tury there resulted an alarming diminution of the military 

 resources of the country; and there is still extant a letter of 

 the great churchman, the Venerable Bede, in which, im- 

 ploring the kings and bishops to put a stop to the grants of 

 land for monastic purposes, because subsequently misused, 

 he says: "Many Northumbrians put aside their arms, cut 

 off their hair and hasten to enroll themselves in the monas- 

 tic ranks, instead of exercising themselves in their military 

 duties. The future alone will tell what good will result from 

 this." Perhaps some of you will recollect a more modern 

 instance in the law of Peter the Great, forbidding any State 



