Page:Pleasures of England (1888).djvu/39

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Bertha to Osburga.
21

form of it, that is to say, the most merciful, charitable, variously applicable, kindly wise.) The greatest type of it, as far as I know, St. Martin of Tours, whose character is sketched, I think in the main rightly, in the Bible of Amiens; and you may bind together your thoughts of its course by remembering that Alcuin, born at York, dies in the Abbey of St. Martin, at Tours; that as St. Augustine was in his writings Charlemagne's Evangelist in faith, Alcuin was, in living presence, his master in rhetoric, logic, and astronomy, with the other physical sciences.

A hundred years later than St. Augustine, comes the rule of St. Benedict—the Monastic rule, virtually, of European Christianity, ever since—and theologically the Law of Works, as distinguished from the Law of Faith. St. Augustine and all the disciples of St. Augustine tell Christians what they should feel and think: St. Benedict and all the disciples of St. Benedict tell Christians what they should say and do.

In the briefest, but also the perfectest distinction, the disciples of St. Augustine are those who open the door to Christ—"If any man hear my voice"; but the Benedictines those to whom Christ opens the door—"To him that knocketh it shall be opened."

Now, note broadly the course and action of this rule, as it combines with the older one. St. Augustine's, accepted heartily by Clovis, and, with various degrees of understanding, by the kings and queens of the