St. Augustine especially of lay, as distinguished from monastic,
Christianity to the Franks, and finally to us. His rule, expanded into
the treatise of the City of God, is taken for guide of life and policy
by Charlemagne, and becomes certainly the fountain of Evangelical
Christianity, distinctively so called, (and broadly the lay
Christianity of Europe, since, in the purest form of it, that is
to say, the most merciful, charitable, variously applicable, kindly
wise.) The greatest type of it, as far as I know, St. Martin of Tours,
whose character is sketched, I think in the main rightly, in the Bible
of Amiens; and you may bind together your thoughts of its course
by remembering that Alcuin, born at York, dies in the Abbey of
St. Martin, at Tours; that as St. Augustine was in his writings
Charlemagne's Evangelist in faith, Alcuin was, in living presence,
his master in rhetoric, logic, and astronomy, with the other physical
sciences.

A hundred years later than St. Augustine, comes the rule of St.
Benedict--the Monastic rule, virtually, of European Christianity, ever
since--and theologically the Law of Works, as distinguished from the
Law of Faith. St. Augustine and all the disciples of St. Augustine
tell Christians what they should feel and think: St. Benedict and all
the disciples of St. Benedict tell Christians what they should say and
do.

In the briefest, but also the perfectest distinction, the disciples
of St. Augustine are those who open the door to Christ--"If any man
hear my voice"; but the Benedictines those to whom Christ opens the
door--"To him that knocketh it shall be opened."

Now, note broadly the course and action of this rule, as it combines