\o. 4.] MONKS IN AGRICULTURE. 23 



From tliis great movement, which lasted two hundred 

 years, the church gained an enormous increase of power and 

 territory. The secular princes ruined themselves for the 

 cause of Jesus Christ, whilst the princes of the church took 

 advantage of the fervor of the Christians to enrich them- 

 selves. It bought up for a mere song an immense extent 

 of property, which the owners disposed of to raise the 

 funds requisite to equip them for this long journey, and thus 

 laid the foundation for those extensive church endowments 

 which in the time of Luther and the French Revolution ex- 

 cited so bitter a controversy. 



Summing up then the influence of the monks, we can 

 outline it thus : The rule of St. Benedict presented agri- 

 culture as an occupation useful and worthy of a truly reli- 

 gious person whose life was to be spent between manual 

 labor and spiritual contemplation.* He taught that the 

 brothers ought not to feel themselves humiliated if poverty 

 compelled them to gather with their own hands the products 

 of the soil. First, then, they themselves cultivated the 

 ground, and this has been continued even until our own 

 time in certain orders. The monks of Citeaux were par- 

 ticularly distinguished in this respect, for in their earlier 

 days it was not permitted them to possess any revenues. 

 When a new monastery was founded there was ordinarily 

 bestowed upon it land not } r et broken or land which, hav- 

 ing been devastated by the incursions of the enemy, had 

 become useless to its owner. Sometimes it was covered 

 with forests or with water, or it was a sterile valley sur- 

 rounded by lofty mountains, or a country in which there 

 was no arable land and it was necessary for the monastery 

 to purchase earth in the neighborhood and bring it in. The 

 monks cleared with their own hands the forests and erected 

 peaceful habitations for man in the spots where formerly 

 had lurked the wolf and the bear. The} r turned aside dev- 

 astating torrents, they restrained by means of dykes rivers 

 accustomed to overflow their banks, and soon the deserts 

 where before was heard only the cry of the owl and the 

 hiss of the serpent were changed into smiling fields and fat 



* Hurter, " Gesehichte Papst Innocenz III. und seiner Zeitijcnossen." 



