Europe must ever be indebted to Benedict and his immediate followers
for their services in reclaiming waste lands, and in removing the
stigma which a corrupt civilization had placed upon labor. Benedict
came before the world saying: “No person is ever more usefully employed
than when working with his hands or following the plough, providing
food for the use of man.” Care was taken that councils should not be
called when ploughing was to be done or wheat to be threshed. Benedict
bent himself to the task of teaching the rich and the proud, the poor
and the lazy the alphabet of prosperity and happiness. Agriculture was
at its lowest ebb. Marshes covered once fertile fields, and the men who
should have tilled the land spurned the plough as degrading, or were
too indolent to undertake the tasks of the farm. The monks left their
cells and their prayers to dig ditches and plough fields. The effect
was magical. Men once more turned back to a noble but despised
industry. Peace and plenty supplanted war and poverty. “The
Benedictines,” says Guizot, “have been 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 Brittany; there, at once missionaries and laborers, they
accomplish their double service, through peril and fatigue.”
It is to be regretted that history throws a shadow across this
pleasing scene. When labor came to be recognized as honorable and
useful, along came the begging friars, creating, both by precept and
example, a prejudice against labor and wealth. Rags and laziness came
to be associated with holiness, and a beggar monk was held up as an
ideal and sacred personage. “The spirit that makes men devote
themselves in vast numbers,” says Lecky, “to a monotonous life of
asceticism and poverty is so essentially opposed to the spirit that
creates the energy and enthusiasm of industry, that their continued
coexistence may be regarded as impossible.” But such a fatal mistake
could not long captivate the mind, or cause men to forget Benedict and
his industrial ideal. The blessings of wealth rightly administered, and
the dignity of labor without which wealth is impossible, came to be
recognized as necessary factors in the true progress of man.