hat in the early middle age the cleverest men were
generally inside the convent, trying, by moral influence and superior
intellect, to keep those outside from tearing each other to pieces.

But these intellects could not remain locked up in the monasteries. The
daily routine of devotion, even of silent study and contemplation, was
not sufficient for them, as it was for the average monk. There was still
a reserve of force in them, which must be up and doing; and which, in a
man inspired by that Spirit which is the Spirit of love to man as well as
to God, must needs expand outwards in all directions, to Christianize, to
civilize, to colonize.

To colonize. When people talk loosely of founding an abbey for
superstitious uses, they cannot surely be aware of the state of the
countries in which those abbeys were founded; either primaeval forest,
hardly-tilled common, or to be described by that terrible epithet of
Domesday-book, 'wasta'--wasted by war. A knowledge of that fact would
lead them to guess that there were almost certainly uses for the abbey
which had nothing to do with superstition; which were as thoroughly
practical as those of a company for draining the bog of Allen, or running
a railroad through an American forest. Such, at least, was the case, at
least for the first seven centuries after the fall of Rome; and to these
missionary colonizers Europe owes, I verily believe, among a hundred
benefits, this which all Englishmen will appreciate; that Roman
agriculture not only revived in the countries which were once the Empire,
but spread from thence eastward and northward, into the principal
wilderness of the Teuton and Sclavonic races.

I cannot, I think, shew you better what manner of men these
monk-colonizers were, and what sort of work they did, than by giving you
the biography of one of them; and out of many I have chosen that of St.
Sturmi, founder whilome of the great abbey of Fulda, which lies on the
central watershed of Germany, about equidistant, to speak roughly, from
Frankfort, Cassel, Gotha, and Coburg.

His life is matter of history, written by one Eigils (sainted like
himself), who was his disciple and his friend. Naturally told it is, and
lovingly; but if I recollect right, without a single miracle or myth; the
living contemporaneous picture of such a man, living in such a state of
society, as we shall never (and happily need never) see again, but which
is for that very reason worthy to be pr