But the rule spread with wonderful rapidity. In every rich valley arose
a Benedictine abbey. Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, France and Spain
adopted his rule. Princes, moved by various motives, hastened to bestow
grants of land on the indefatigable missionary who, undeterred by the
wildness of the forest and the fierceness of the barbarian, settled in
the remotest regions. In the various societies of the Benedictines there
have been thirty-seven thousand monasteries and one hundred and fifty
thousand abbots. For the space of two hundred and thirty-nine years the
Benedictines governed the church by forty-eight popes chosen from their
order. They boast of two hundred cardinals, seven thousand archbishops,
fifteen thousand bishops and four thousand saints. The astonishing
assertion is also made that no less than twenty emperors and forty-seven
kings resigned their crowns to become Benedictine monks. Their convents
claim ten empresses and fifty queens. Many of these earthly rulers
retired to the seclusion of the monastery because their hopes had been
crushed by political defeat, or their consciences smitten by reason of
crime or other sins. Some were powerfully attracted by the heroic
element of monastic life, and these therefore spurned the luxuries and
emoluments of royalty, in order by personal sacrifice to achieve
spiritual domination in this life, and to render their future salvation
certain. But whatever the motive that drew queens and princes to the
monastic order, the retirement of such large numbers of the nobility
indicates the influence of a religious system which could cope so
successfully with the attractions of the palace and the natural passion
for political dominion.
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