forge, an oven, and shops for shoes and clothing.
According to the rules of his order, he reads daily for two hours. He
gives seven hours to manual labor, and he neither eats nor drinks more
than is absolutely essential. Through his intelligent, voluntary labor,
conscientiously performed and with a view to the future, he produces
more than the layman does. Through his temperate, judicious, economical
system he consumes less than the layman does. Hence it is that where
the layman had failed he sustains himself and even prospers.[1105] He
welcomes the unfortunate, feeds them, sets them to work, and unites them
in matrimony and beggars, vagabonds, and fugitive peasants gather around
the sanctuary. Their camp gradually becomes a village and next a small
town; man plows as soon as he can be sure of his crops, and becomes the
father of a family as soon as he considers himself able to provide for
his offspring. In this way new centers of agriculture and industry are
formed, which likewise become new centers of population.[1106]

To food for the body add food for the soul, not less essential. For,
along with nourishment, it was still necessary to furnish Man with
inducements to live, or, at the very least, with the resignation that
makes life endurable, and also with the poetic daydreams taking the
place of massing happiness.[1107] Down to the middle of the thirteenth
century the clergy stands almost alone in furnishing this. Through
its innumerable legends of saints, through its cathedrals and their
construction, through its statues and their expression, through its
services and their still transparent meaning, it rendered visible "the
kingdom of God." It finally sets up an ideal world at the end of the
present one, like a magnificent golden pavilion at the end of a miry
morass.[1108] The saddened heart, athirst for tenderness and serenity,
takes refuge in this divine and gentle world. Persecutors there, about
to strike, are arrested by an invisible hand; wild beasts become docile;
the stags of the forest come of their own accord every morning to draw
the chariots of the saints; the country blooms for them like a new
Paradise; they die only when it pleases them. Meanwhile they comfort
mankind; goodness, piety, forgiveness flows from their lips with
ineffable sweetness; with eyes upturned to heaven, they see God, and
without effort, as in a dream, they ascend into the light and seat
themselves at His right hand. How divine the