t, just off the southern coast of France,
is deservedly one of the places most venerated in Christendom. The
monastery of Lerins, founded there in the fourth century, became a
mother of similar institutions in western Europe, and a centre of
religious teaching for the Christian world. In its atmosphere, legends
and myths grew in beauty and luxuriance. Here, as the chroniclers tell
us, at the touch of St. Honorat, burst forth a stream of living water,
which a recent historian of the monastery declares a greater miracle
than that of Moses; here he destroyed, with a touch of his staff, the
reptiles which infested the island, and then forced the sea to wash away
their foul remains. Here, to please his sister, Sainte-Marguerite, a
cherry tree burst into full bloom every month; here he threw his cloak
upon the waters and it became a raft, which bore him safely to visit the
neighbouring island; here St. Patrick received from St. Just the staff
with which he imitated St. Honorat by driving all reptiles from Ireland.
Pillaged by Saracens and pirates, the island was made all the more
precious by the blood of Christian martyrs. Popes and kings made
pilgrimages to it; saints, confessors, and bishops went forth from it
into all Europe; in one of its cells St. Vincent of Lerins wrote that
famous definition of pure religion which, for nearly fifteen hundred
years, has virtually superseded that of St. James. Naturally the
monastery became most illustrious, and its seat "the Mediterranean Isle
of Saints."

But toward the close of the last century, its inmates having become
slothful and corrupt, it was dismantled, all save a small portion torn
down, and the island became the property first of impiety, embodied in a
French actress, and finally of heresy, embodied in an English clergyman.

Bought back for the Church by the Bishop of Frejus in 1859, there
was little revival of life for twelve years. Then came the reaction,
religious and political, after the humiliation of France and the Vatican
by Germany; and of this reaction the monastery of St. Honorat was made
one of the most striking outward and visible signs. Pius IX interested
himself directly in it, called into it a body of Cistercian monks,
and it became the chief seat of their order in France. To restore its
sacredness the strict system of La Trappe was established--labour,
silence, meditation on death. The word thus given from Rome was seconded
in France by cardinals, archbishop