o be the guide of innumerable souls in the
most sublime paths of Christian perfection, compiled a monastic rule,
which, for wisdom and discretion, St. Gregory the Great preferred to all
other rules; and which was afterwards adopted, for some time, by all the
monks of the West. It is principally founded on silence, solitude,
prayer, humility, and obedience.[8]

St. Bennet calls his Order a school in which men learn how to serve God:
and his life was to his disciples a perfect model for their imitation,
and a transcript of his rule. Being chosen by God, like another Moses,
to conduct faithful souls into the true promised land, the kingdom of
heaven, he was enriched with eminent supernatural gifts, even those of
miracles and prophecy. He seemed, like another Eliseus, endued by God
with an extraordinary power, commanding all nature; and like the ancient
prophets, foreseeing future events. He often raised the sinking courage
of his monks, and baffled the various artifices of the devil with the
sign of the cross, rendered the heaviest stone light in building his
monastery by a short prayer, and, in presence of a multitude of people,
raised to life a novice who had been crushed by the fall of a wall at
Mount Cassino. He foretold, with {635} many tears, that this monastery
should be profaned and destroyed; which happened forty years after, when
the Lombards demolished it about the year 580. He added, that he had
scarce been able to obtain of God that the inhabitants should be
saved.[9] It was strictly forbid by the rule of St. Benedict, for any
monk to eat out of his monastery, unless he was at such a distance {636}
that he could not return home that day, and this rule, says Saint
Gregory, was inviolably observed. Indeed, nothing more dangerously
engages monks in the commerce of the world; nothing more enervates in
them the discipline of abstinence and mortification, than for them to
eat and drink with seculars abroad. St. Gregory tells us, that St.
Bennet knew by revelation the fault of one of his monks who had accepted
of an invitation to take some refreshment when he was abroad on
business.[10] A messenger who brought the saint a present of two bottles
of wine, and had hid one of them, was put in mind by him to beware of
drinking of the other, in which he afterwards found a serpent. One of
the monks, after preaching to the nuns, had accepted of some
handkerchiefs from them, which he hid in his bosom; but the saint, upon
his