Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/75

Rh in which many a devoted monk had spent his self-denying life of prayer and meditation. But it was not till the Benedictine monks had won over the main body of English by their example of high living, as much as by their teaching, that monastic life became at all universal in England.

To the monks of early England we owe all our most precious treasures in literature as well as in art. Can our country ever forget the old monk of Jarrow, the father of English learning, and the ideal of the divinity of work which he put before his people? Who but the monks translated the Latin prayers into Saxon and illuminated the Saxon Gospels, adorning the margins with virgins and apostles in Anglo-Saxon dress playing on Anglo-Saxon instruments? They were our keenest agriculturists, our most skilful fishermen, our best informed gardeners, our earliest doctors. They reclaimed the waste land, they cut the virgin forests: no labour was too hard, no toil too rough for these servants of God. The monastery was not only a school of learning: it was at once a shelter for the destitute and a refuge for the sick, from whose hospitable doors no stranger was ever