missionary, or, perhaps it might be said, as his missionary, to do the work. Of itself it was the Catholic Church, Christian society, the kingdom which our Lord came to establish over the whole earth on a small model scale, in her most perfect form. They who on that day saw her approach to the seat of the Saxon king with the Cross for her standard, borne before her, saw the Catholic Church in miniature, as the world had seen her six centuries before: first in the holy family; then in our Lord united with His disciples; and finally, in the first assembly of the faithful in the Jerusalem chamber, listening to the voice of Christ's first Vicar, St. Peter.

Thus identified with the Church planted in England by the Vicar of Christ, sprang and grew up the monastic system in England. The seed which produced it was sown by the great "Sower" Himself during His earthly ministry. His own life with His blessed mother and St. Joseph, at Nazareth, had also been an exemplification of it for thirty years. Nor did He renounce it when He left His home and entered on "His Father's business." The same, we should have to say of His great forerunner, St. John the Baptist. By the time St. Gregory took the chair of St. Peter and became the infallible teacher and interpreter of God's Word, written and unwritten, the monastic system was viewed and treated as an integral part of the divine organization of the Church. The monastery as often preceded the Church as the

Church preceded the monastery, where nations had to be converted in those early times. Even now when Bishops are appointed to new sees in the New World, their first care invariably is to secure an accompaniment of Regulars, male and female, to help them. It was by pursuing that course that the Church has kept her ground throughout the world up to the present time. Innumerable notable proofs of this are afforded in France and Spain from the earliest times.

That St. Gregory had, in adopting the monastic system as his method of converting England, been merely executing the will of God, the apostolate of St. Augustine, though limited to five years, gave ample proof. The king, though a pagan, graciously received him and his suite of saintly attendants, and submitted to the faith, requesting to be baptized. His court and the nobility speedily followed his example. In a couple of years the converts numbered ten thousand. The result might seem a reproduction of the rapid increase of the conversions in Jerusalem immediately after the day of the Great Pentecost. Nor was the kingdom of Kent the only conquest to the faith made by the monastic missionaries. Within an incredibly short time, the kingdom of our Lord had acquired a holding of less or more extent in every one of the seven states into which Saxon England was at that time divided. The "little leaven" of the parable, "hid in three measures of

meal," once imbedded in the soil, by its secret and impalpable actions on the barbarous races that encompassed it, in brief process of time assimilated them to itself, "till the whole were leavened" and wrought into one body, the one Catholic and Apostolic Church.

What the apostles with Christ at their head were to be in relation to the whole earth, this little band of men with Christ's Vicar directing them were the event proved-to England. Its business did not end, any more than its Divine Master's did, in merely leavening the people of that generation with the Catholic faith. As the apostolic band were to be "the salt” of the earth throughout the world, so St. Augustine and his companions were, in like manner, to be "the salt" of the earth throughout England. This great end of their mission they carried out by planting monasteries, the seed of their own, throughout the country. Convents of women emulated the monasteries of men, in their zeal for the extirpation of idolatry and the establishment of Christ's kingdom in its place. Instead of one monastery at Canterbury shedding the light of religion around within a limited sphere, monasteries and convents rose up by the hundred to do the work begun by St. Augustine in every part of England. The work remained to be the same, God's work, instituted by Christ's Vicar, while only the hands changed and multiplied that did it. The extraordinary increase was a fulfilment

of the parable in which the "good seed" of the great Sower, who went forth to sow, brought forth "some sixty, some a hundredfold."

To convert the native inhabitants of a country from paganism and idolatry to Christianity and to God, implied nothing less than the destruction of the kingdom of Satan and the establishment of the kingdom of our Lord in its place. Yet nothing less than that stupendous achievement was the object contemplated by St. Gregory. For the new social edifice which was to be erected, the materials as well as the workmen must be found in the country. A Christian priesthood and a Christian people must be formed out of a race of men who had been born and bred in heathenism. Before such a race could become the parents of a Christian generation, they must themselves be regenerated, that is, made Christians. As to the way this was to be effected, the new mission had come well instructed. It had been settled for them that they were to preach the Gospel, calling on men everywhere, as their Divine Master had charged His first apostles, to do penance for their sins, and to be baptized into the faith of Jesus Christ. On this foundation, which Christ only could lay, and on which only His priesthood could build, was the new social edifice to be reared in England. But though preaching took the first place in the divine enterprise which was to accomplish this great end against a phalanx of opposing circumstances, it required something

besides mere preaching. Though it be a divine truth that man does not live by bread alone, it is equally true that he cannot live without it. Hence it is that God, while He made man to His own image, made it his lot to earn his bread by the labour of his hands in the cultivation of the earth. When God put Adam in the Garden of Eden, it was made his duty “to dress and to keep it " (Gen. i. 15). While he remained in his state of innocence, that work, though of manual labour, would be a pleasure. It was only after his fall from innocence that it became a task and a toil, and, so far, a penalty for sin. One of the natural effects of the fall upon man was, consequently, to make him hate labour. It is only when people are obliged to work for their daily bread that, as a rule, men will work. Of this fact the world affords abundant testimony. A brood of social and domestic vices-idleness, slothfulness, selfishness, misuse of time-are the natural consequence where the divine law laid upon Adam, "In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread," is not kept, and not respected.

That the earth by man's manual labour should be made to yield food for his support, was an article in the covenant of life given to him, and in him to his posterity for ever. We have in sacred history abundant proof that this article continued to be practically acted upon throughout the whole pre-Christian Dispensation. It tells us that Abel was a shepherd, Cain a tiller of the ground, that Noe planted a vine