ry we may remark," says Mr. Turner,
"that Domesday Survey gives us some indication that the cultivation of
the church lands was much superior to that of any other order of
society. They have much less wood upon them, and less common of pasture;
and what they had appears often in smaller and more irregular pieces;
while their meadow was more abundant, and in more numerous
distributions." Hist. of Anglo-Saxons, vol. ii. p. 167.

It was the glory of St. Benedict's reform, to have substituted bodily
labour for the supine indolence of oriental asceticism. In the East it
was more difficult to succeed in such an endeavour, though it had been
made. "The Benedictins have been," says Guizot, "the great clearers of
land in Europe. A colony, a little swarm of monks, settled in places
nearly uncultivated, often in the midst of a pagan population, in
Germany, for example, or in Britany; there, at once missionaries and
labourers, they accomplished their double service through peril and
fatigue." Civilis. en France, Lecon 14. The north-eastern parts of
France, as far as the Lower Seine, were reduced into cultivation by the
disciples of St. Columban, in the sixth and seventh centuries. The
proofs of this are in Mabillon's Acta Sanctorum Ord. Bened. See Mem. de
l'Acad. des Sciences Morales et Politiques, iii. 708.

Guizot has appreciated the rule of St. Benedict with that candid and
favourable spirit which he always has brought to the history of the
church: anxious, as it seems, not only to escape the imputation of
Protestant prejudices by others, but to combat them in his own mind; and
aware, also, that the partial misrepresentations of Voltaire had sunk
into the minds of many who were listening to his lectures. Compared with
the writers of the eighteenth century, who were too much alienated by
the faults of the clergy to acknowledge any redeeming virtues, or even
with Sismondi, who, coming in a moment of reaction, feared the returning
influence of mediaeval prejudices, Guizot stands forward as an equitable
and indulgent arbitrator. In this spirit he says of the rule of St.
Benedict--La pensee morale et la discipline generale en sont severes;
mais dans le detail de la vie elle est humaine et moderee; plus humaine,
plus moderee que les lois barbares, que les moeurs generales du temps;
et je ne doute pas que les freres, renfermes dans l'interieur d'un
monastere, n'y fussent gouvernes par une autorite, a tout prendre, et
plus raisonnable,