Book Description

THERE is perhaps no Order in the Church which at once commands our admiration and wins our love like that of the great Order of St. Benedict. Even heresy has offered its poor meed of praise in attempting to transplant it to a foreign soil, and is fain to shelter its feeble imitation of religious life under the name of the great Patriarch of the West, claiming a patron in the Church, because none can be found outside its pale. It stands, like a primeval forest, by the great river Time— its roots extending deep and wide, and forming an unshaken barrier to the ever-surging waves: its branches extending far and high, and affording shelter and protection in the wildest storms. Peace and strength are the essential characteristics of its Rule and its children; prayer and love, the source and the support of these, its most manifest glories. And of this spirit St. Gertrude is the perfect realization; aPax vobiscumis breathed into the soul in every revelation and in every action of that greatest of Saints. Her strength is the calm, beautiful strength of peace; for perfect peace alone can exist where the soul is stayed upon the Unchangeable, and thus can no longer be shaken by the transitory blasts which disturb the less perfect. This work has been undertaken with feelings of no ordinary affection. There are few Orders in the Church which are not indebted in some degree to the Benedictine, but none more deeply than that of the poor one of Assisi, who found in the Benedictines his first and kindest supporters; and when his second Order was established, itwas they who gave a temporary home and a holy example to the gentle Clare de Scefi and her young sister Agnes. We can scarcely turn over a page in the history of the Friars Minors or the Poor Clares without finding how this kindness has been continued and increased. May this offering to the great Order of St. Benedict be accepted by his devoted children as a humble though a poor return for their unwearied love!