Benedictine monk built his cabin of boughs amid briers and
brambles.[4] Large areas around him, formerly cultivated, are nothing
but abandoned thickets. Along with his associates he clears the ground
and erects buildings; he domesticates half-tamed animals, he
establishes a farm, a mill, a forge, an oven, and shops for shoes and
clothing. According to the rules of his order, he reads daily for two
hours. He gives seven hours to manual labor, and he neither eats nor
drinks more than is absolutely essential. Through his intelligent,
voluntary labor, conscientiously performed and with a view to the
future, he produces more than the layman does. Through his temperate,
judicious, economical system he consumes less than the layman does.
Hence it is that where the layman had failed he sustains himself and
even prospers.[5] He welcomes the unfortunate, feeds them, sets them
to work, and unites them in matrimony and beggars, vagabonds, and
fugitive peasants gather around the sanctuary. Their camp gradually
becomes a village and next a small town; man plows as soon as he can
be sure of his crops, and becomes the father of a family as soon as he
considers himself able to provide for his offspring. In this way new
centers of agriculture and industry are formed, which likewise become
new centers of population.[6]

To food for the body add food for the soul, not less essential.
For, along with nourishment, it was still necessary to furnish Man
with inducements to live, or, at the very least, with the resignation
that makes life endurable, and also with the poetic daydreams taking
the place of massing happiness.[7] Down to the middle of the
thirteenth century the clergy stands almost alone in furnishing this.
Through its innumerable legends of saints, through its cathedrals and
their construction, through its statues and their expression, through
its services and their still transparent meaning, it rendered visible