spiritual. And as the new tide of barbarian invasion, Saracen or
Norman, sweeps on in Spain or Gaul, the Church, for very physical
needs, seeks refuge under the protection of lay barons, princes, and
kings. Feudalism is rising. The monastic houses fall often under the
arrogant rule of lay abbats. And the popes, not rarely a prey
themselves to the vices of the age, sink into impotence and become
enmeshed in worldly, often shameful, intrigue and disorder. The canons
of Church councils show that it was below as it was above. Secularity
was general, vice was far from rare.

The Divine spirit and the past history of Christianity made it certain
that a revival of life must come. The dry bones would feel the breath
and would live {173} again. [Sidenote: S. Odo.] On the borders of the
lands of Maine and Anjou was born in 879, of a line of feudal barons,
Odo, the regenerator of monasticism, the ultimate reviver of the
papacy, the spiritual progenitor of Hildebrand himself. Promised to
God at his birth, he was long held back by his father for knighthood
and the life of a warrior such as he himself had led; a grievous
sickness gave him, on his recovery, to the monastic life. The disciple
alike of S. Martin and S. Benedict, he took inspiration from them to
revive the strict monastic rule. From a canon he became a monk, after
a noviciate at Baume, the foundation of Columban in the wild and
beautiful valley between the Seille and the Dard, in the diocese of
Besancon. For a time he tasted the life of the anchorite and the
coenobite. Then he passed to the abbey of Cluny, founded in 910 by
William of Aquitaine in the mountains above the valley of the Grosne,
and ruled till 927 by Berno, who came himself from Baume. On his death
Odo became abbat; and to him the great development of the revival of
strict monasticism is due.

[Sidenote: Cluny.]

Cluny became the type of the exempted abbeys, and the highest
representative of the monastic privileges. It embodied in itself the
best expression of the resistance to feudalism; it became the most
powerful support of the papacy and of the much-needed movement for the
reform of the Church. The first necessity of the new monasticism was
an absolute independence of the lay power. Thus the founder attached
it from the first to the Roman Church, and gave up all his own rights
of property. Its situation, in the heart of Burgundy, {174} removed it
from the power of the king. Charl