ended by sighing for the quiet life of the monk who divided his day
between labor, reading and prayer, whilst he himself spent his years
amid the noisy throng and the perplexities of his episcopate.

These men, and many others, did much to further monasticism. But we must
now leave sunny Africa and journey northward through Gaul into the land
of the hardy Britons and Scots.

Athanasius, the same weary exile whom we have encountered in Egypt and
in Rome, had been banished by Constantine to Treves, in 336. In 346 and
349 he again visited Gaul. He told the same story of Anthony and the
Egyptian hermits with similar results.

The most renowned ecclesiastic of the Gallican church, whose name is
most intimately associated with the spread of monasticism in Western
Europe, before the days of Benedict, was Saint Martin of Tours. He lived
about the years 316-396 A.D. The chronicle of his life is by no means
trustworthy, but that is essential neither to popularity nor saintship.
Only let a Severus describe his life and miracles in glowing rhetoric
and fantastic legend and the people will believe it, pronouncing him
greatest among the great, the mightiest miracle-worker of that
miracle-working age.

Martin was a soldier three years, against his will, under Constantine.
One bleak winter day he cut his white military coat in two with his
sword and clothed a beggar with half of it. That night he heard Jesus
address the angels: "Martin, as yet only a catechumen has clothed me
with his garment." After leaving the army he became a hermit, and,
subsequently, bishop of Tours. He lived for years just outside of Tours
in a cell made of interlaced branches. His monks dwelt around him in