cy), personal poverty, and obedience, proved in those days of
lawlessness and barbarism, a blessing to mankind. They converted heaths and
forests into flourishing farms. They afforded a place of refuge (asylum) to
the persecuted and oppressed. They ennobled the rude minds of men by the
preaching of the Gospel. They planted the seeds of morality and
civilization in the bosoms of the young by their schools for education. And
they preserved the remains of ancient literature and philosophy from utter
destruction. Many of the Benedictine monasteries were the nurseries of
education, the arts, and the sciences, as St. Gallen, Fulda, Reichenau, and
Corvey (in Westphalia), and many others. When the Benedictine order became
relaxed, the monastery in Clugny, in Burgundy, separated itself from them
in the tenth century, and introduced a more rigid discipline. In the
twelfth century the monks of Clugny numbered upward of two thousand
cloisters. But this order, also, soon proved insufficient to satisfy the
strong demands of the middle age, against the allurements of sin, and the
seductions of the flesh; so that, at the end of the eleventh century, the
Cistercians, and, a few decades later, the Premonstrants sprang up: the
former in Burgundy (Citeaux), the latter in a woody country near Laon
(Premontre). The order of Carthusians, founded about the year {88} 1084,
which commenced with a cloister of anchorites (Carthusia, Chartreuse) in a
rugged valley near Grenoble, was the most austere in its practice. A life
of solitude and silence in a cell, a spare and meagre diet, a penitential
garment of hair, flagellations, and the rigid practices of devotional
exercises, were duties imposed upon every member of this fraternity.

They deserve, at our hands, the full benefit of an honest and severe
Christian effort to find out and nurture truth; so long as government and
political power did not control them. History next tells us of the
so-called "MENDICANT ORDERS." They originated in the thirteenth century,
and this establishment was productive of remarkable results. Francis of
Assisi (A.D. 1226), the son of a rich merchant, renounced all his
possessions, clothed himself in rags, and wandered through the world,
begging, and preaching repentance. His fiery zeal procured him disciples,
who, like himself, renounced their worldly possessions, fasted, prayed,
tore their backs with scourges, and supplied their slender wants from
voluntary alms and donat