quitted
the valley, and built a monastery in a more spacious place, in that
neighborhood. He showed his love of poverty by his rigorous practice of
it: for he long used wooden, and afterwards glass or pewter chalices at
the altar; and if any presents of silk ornaments were made him, he gave
them to other churches. However, he some time after changed his way of
thinking with respect to the church; built a cloister, and a stately
church adorned with marble pillars, furnished it with silver chalices,
and rich ornaments, and bought a great number of books. He had in a
short time three hundred religious under his direction, and also
exercised a general inspection over all the monasteries of Provence,
Languedoc, and Gascony, which respected him as their common parent and
master. At last he remitted something in the austerities of the
reformation he had introduced among them. Felix, bishop of Urgel, had
advanced that Christ was not the natural, but only the adoptive son of
the eternal Father. St. Benedict most learnedly opposed this heresy, and
assisted, in 794, at the council assembled against it at Frankfort. He
employed his pen to confute the same, in four treatises, published in
the miscellanies of Clausius.

Benedict was become the oracle of the whole kingdom, and he established
his reformation in many great monasteries with little or no opposition.
His most illustrious colony was the monastery of Gellone, founded in
804, by William, duke of Aquitaine, who retired into it himself, whence
it was called St. Guillem du Desert. By the councils held under
Charlemagne, in 813, and by the Capitulars of that prince, published the
same year, it was ordained that the canons should live according to the
canons and laws of the church, and the monks according to the rule of
St. Bennet: by which regulation a uniformity was introduced in the
monastic order in the West. The emperor Louis Debonnaire, who succeeded
his father on the 28th of {400} January, 814, committed to the saint the
inspection of all the abbeys in his kingdom. To have him nearer his own
person, the emperor obliged him to live in the abbey of Marmunster, in
Alsace; and as this was still too remote, desirous of his constant
assistance in his councils, he built the monastery of Inde, two leagues
from Aix-la-Chapelle, the residence of the emperor and court.
Notwithstanding St. Benedict's constant abode in this monastery, he had
still a hand in restoring monastic discipline