permanent features which are unaffected by his limitation. It offers
balanced opportunities of development to the body, the mind and the
spirit; laying equal emphasis on hard work, study, and prayer. It aims
at a robust completeness, not at the production of professional
ascetics; indeed, its Rule says little about physical austerities,
insists on sufficient food and rest, and countenances no extremes.
According to Abbot Butler, St. Benedict's day was divided into three and
a half hours for public worship, four and a half for reading and
meditation, six and a half for manual work, eight and a half for sleep,
and one hour for meals. So that in spite of the time devoted to
spiritual and mental interests, the primitive Benedictine did a good
day's work and had a good night's rest at the end of it. The work might
be anything that wanted doing, so long as the hours of prayer were not
infringed. Agriculture, scholarship, education, handicrafts and art have
all been done perfectly by St. Benedict's sons, working and willing in
quiet love. This is what one of the greatest constructive minds of
Christendom regarded as a reasonable way of life; a frame within which
the loftiest human faculties could grow, and man's spirit achieve that
harmony with God which is its goal. Moreover, this life was to be
social. It was in the beginning just the busy useful life of an Italian
farm, lived in groups--in monastic families, under the rule and
inspiration not of a Master but of an Abbot; a Father who really was the
spiritual parent of his monks, and sought to train them in the humility,
obedience, self-denial and gentle suppleness of character which are the
authentic fruits of the Spirit. This ideal, it seems to me, has
something still to say to us; some reproof to administer to our hurried
and muddled existence, our confusion of values, our failure to find time
for reality. We shall find in it and its creator, if we look, all those
marks of the regenerate life of the Spirit which history has shown to us
as normal: namely the transcendent aim, the balanced career of action