great rapidity over the whole of Europe, maintained a clear
supremacy, formed the model for all other monastic orders, and gave to
the Catholic Church an imposing array of missionaries, authors, artists,
bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and popes, as Gregory the Great and
Gregory VII. In less than a century after the death of Benedict, the
conquests of the barbarians in Italy, Gaul, and Spain were reconquered
for civilization, and the vast territories of Great Britain, Germany,
and Scandinavia incorporated into Christendom or opened to missionary
labor; and in this progress of history the monastic institution
regulated and organized by Benedict's rule bears an honorable share.

Benedict himself established a second cloister in the vicinity of
Terracina, and two of his favorite disciples, Placidus and St.
Maurus,[18] introduced the 'holy rule,' the one into Sicily, the other
into France. Pope Gregory the Great, himself at one time a Benedictine
monk, enhanced its prestige, and converted the Anglo-Saxons to the Roman
Christian faith by Benedictine monks. Gradually the rule found so
general acceptance both in old and in new institutions, that, in the
time of Charlemagne, it became a question, whether there were any monks
at all who were not Benedictines. The order, it is true, has degenerated
from time to time, through the increase of its wealth and the decay of
its discipline, but its fostering care of religion, of humane studies,
and of the general civilization of Europe, from the tilling of the soil
to the noblest learning, has given it an honorable place in history and
won immortal praise.

The patronage of learning, however, as we have already said, was not
within the design of the founder or his rule. The joining of this to the
cloister life is due, if we leave out of view the learned monk Jerome,
to CASSIODORUS, who, in 538, retired from the honors and cares
of high civil office in the Gothic monarchy of Italy,[19] to a monastery
founded by himself at Vivarium[20] (Viviers), in Calabria, in Lower
Italy. Here he spent nearly thirty years as monk and abbot, collected a
large library, encouraged the monks to copy and to study the Holy
Scriptures, the works of the church fathers, and even the ancient
classics, and wrote for them several literary and theological text
books, especially his treatise _De institutione divinarum literarum_, a
kind of elementary encyclopaedia, which was the code of monastic
education for man