s was the state itself. Though preeminently papal and
clerical, yet it was, also, eminently intellectual and classical. The
treasures of a new thought, of culture, of Greco-Roman refinement, and
even of material wealth, were opened to the people of Germany. Fruitful
as these Roman germs were, they were only a ferment for German strength
and characteristics; for the Germans alone made Christianity a living
issue. It was impossible for the putrid soil of the decaying Roman
Empire to become a fruitful abode for Christianity.

Men and women fled to the desert to worship God in solitary
contemplation and far from the temptation of the world. The monks in
spite of the faults and the degeneration which will ever cling to things
human are, after all, the purveyors of intellectual and moral culture.
The cloisters, too, were at first fortresses of civilization, labor,
agriculture, artisanship, and, though with monachal limitations, they
were yet transmitters of literary and classical antiquity.

We need only recall the life of the disciples of Saint Benedict in the
cloister of Saint Gall, so dramatically described by Scheffel in his
_Ekkehard_, their activity in letters and missionary work and gardening,
in the copying of the classics and in teaching, as _Ekkehard_ taught the
Duchess Hadwig the intellectual charms of the great pagan poet Virgil,
to realize the debt owed by civilization to these monks. Though they and
their classics, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, etc., sunk into the
foundations of our civilization, yet, in their fanatic zeal, they
destroyed many priceless old German treasures, relics of antiquity,
which are, unfortunately, irretrievably lost. Charlemagne, with his deep
intuition, recognized the value of these relics, and, assisted by the
staff of free-hearted and free-minded scholars with whom he had
surrounded himself, tried to save what could yet be saved.

With the advent of the monk came the nun. The great Boniface, the
apostle of the Germans, with inflexible will and diplomatic shrewdness,
availed himself of the especial gifts of woman to aid in subjecting
Germany to the Holy See. Not finding sufficient aid in Germany, he
fetched women from England. The Anglo-Saxon abbesses, Lioba of
Bischofsheim, Thekla of Kitzingen, and Walpurgis of Heidenheim, were of
immense utility in his missionary work, and left a saintly memory in
Germany. They raised the female priesthood of the nuns to a lofty
height, their cloisters