yard, that David the king "kept the sheep" of his father, that St. Joseph was a carpenter, St. Peter and several of the other apostles fishermen, St. Matthew a tax-gatherer, and St. Paul a tent-maker. In regard to this condition of life in the original charter given to Adam, no revocation of it takes place under the Christian Dispensation. The notions of the savage tribes who inhabited this island-and it was the same over most parts of the globe at that timewere the very opposite of these. To substitute in their minds Christian, in the place of pagan, ideas on the subject of labour, was a task of as much difficulty as it was to convert them from their idolatrous worship to the worship of the true God. Yet, be the difficulty what it might, it was as necessary to do the one as to do the other. The two were linked together, and they must go together.

A monastic community, introducing manual labour in union with the new religion they preached for the conversion of the inhabitants, was providentially and singularly adapted to master both these difficulties. The sight of a body of men in the midst of them cutting down trees, draining swamps with their own hands, and converting the soil thus reclaimed by cultivation into corn-fields and pasture-lands for flocks and herds, thereby making the earth a proper habitation for man, instead of being, as it had so long been, a cover and a run for the bear and the wolf and other wild beasts-the sight of all that gave a

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character to labour it never had before in their eyes. When, in addition to this, they saw a religion issuing from the same source, the monastery, commended to them by the daily practice of its holy inmates, teaching them that labour of some sort, as all the apostles sent forth by God had taught, was a duty of religious obligation laid upon every man, it gradually ceased to be looked upon as a degradation. They accepted the words of St. Paul as the gospel to them: "If any one will not work, neither shall he eat." And in illustration of this they had the life of our Lord Himself in the New Testament, as they had also in the daily lives of the monks.

At the time St. Augustine and his associates came to England, the cultivation of the soil was the only thing that afforded scope for manual labour to the population. In countries which have made some progress in material civilisation, there are many things besides the soil which afford manual employment. It was favourable to the mission of St. Augustine that there was then nothing but the soil. Whatever advancement in that direction had been made by the Romans during their four hundred years' occupation, had been obliterated, it is believed, by the various savage hordes who came after them and took possession of the island for the intermediate two hundred years before St. Augustine's arrival. It is certain, from the discoveries of archæology, that a good deal of the lands that the Romans had brought

into a state of cultivation, were allowed in after-times to return to their original wild condition, while no fresh additions of reclaimed land were made. The spontaneous productions of the ground, supplemented by the fish, waterfowl, and wild animals which the rivers, marshes, and forests produced, went far towards satisfying the temporal wants of the inhabitants. The abolition of that savage state of life was possibly a matter of greater difficulty than the abolition of the false religions existing among the inhabitants. Vast forests filled with wild beasts could only be cleared away as the Christian population increased and the unchristian decreased; in other words, as the monastic missionaries by their ministrations added to the Church on the one hand, and drew people out of idolatry and barbarism on the other. At the time St. Augustine opened his campaign against this twofold enemy by a twofold force, directed to destroy the idolatry, while it civilized the barbarians, the chase, after war, was the principal employment of the population. The forest and the marsh, while barring the progress of Christian civilization, afforded abundant scope for the spear and the bow. In that way they were a powerful encouragement to the rude and lawless life that universally prevailed. Nor was this peculiar to England. It was everywhere the first enemy the Church had to encounter. And it was the same weapon-namely the monastic institution-by which she everywhere

combated and conquered it. St. Augustine could only fulfil his mission by means of this armour, in which he might well have hope, as it was put upon him by the Vicar of Christ, manual labour being an essential part of religious life.

It is not easy to determine how far the division of England into seven Saxon states, independent of each other, affected the means employed by the Church, from the time of St. Augustine, for the conversion of the country. The Church being a supernatural power, it was pretty much the same to her what the political forms of government were into which the existing inhabitants of a country may have thrown themselves, or whether they had got so far as to have any form of settled organization at all. Be that as it may, whether the strife and disunion among them was favourable or unfavourable to those means, the result was, that before many generations had passed away the Church had created centres for her missionary work in every one of the seven states of the Saxon heptarchy. And among these achievements of hers, are to be numbered the conversions of most of the princes of those states. St. Edmund, king of East Anglia, was not the only one of them who exchanged his earthly crown for that of the martyr's, in heaven.

What the Mother-house had done in Kent under its king, her daughter-houses, as they multiplied and established themselves in other states, by pursuing the same course, succeeded in doing under their kings.

Wherever the Church set up her tabernacle, with her Religious Order to garrison it, whether in the heart of the forest or in the midst of a swamp, her procedure was the same. The offering of the holy sacrifice, preceded by the holy office, having begun and sanctified the day and its coming labours, the monks went forth, axe and spade in hand, to drive back both these unprofitable occupants of the soil into the distance. The reclaimed territory, and the labour by which it had been reclaimed, not only for what they produced for the temporal benefit of man, but for the religion which originated and hallowed them, in their eyes, gained upon the minds of the natives, and gathered them around the monastery as they became Christians. Ere long the Christian hamlet arose, then the village, and finally the town, till the one Christian faith and life prevailed throughout the seven states.

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This unity of faith naturally paved the way, as its Divine Author intended it should, to their becoming a Christian kingdom under one king, instead of seven living in perpetual conflicts with each other. this wonderful unification the Religious Orders, whose labours had brought it about, could not but see the hand of Providence approving and blessing their work. The result was an exact fulfilment of what had been prophetically said of the progress of Christ's kingdom. The ancient prophetic historians thus describe His reign on earth: "And it shall come to pass in the last days that the mountain of the Lord's house shall