Accordingly, of the great minds of Anglo-Saxon England during whole centuries we see nothing in M. Taine’s pages. They are carefully kept out of sight. One of the most majestic figures in all literary history, that of the Venerable Bede, is absent from his chapters, being referred to only twice by name, once as “Bede, their old poet”! The learned Aldhelm is made a mere gleeman on the highway. Roger Bacon’s name is not mentioned--the name of the man who was a prodigy of learning, and who announced the principles of the inductive system nearly four hundred years before Lord Verulam appropriated the glory of its discovery.[6] Augustine, Paulinus, Wilfred, Cuthbert, and scores of others are not referred to. These men and their companions were at once monks, preachers, schoolmasters, book-makers, scribes, authors, physicians, architects, builders, surveyors, and farmers. _Laborare est orare_, Labor is prayer, was their device. Barren moors, repulsive marshes, fever-bearing fens, and wasted tracts they cultivated, and made glad fields of gloomy swamps.
The sandy plains and barren heaths of Northumbria, and the marshes of East Anglia and Mercia, the monks transformed by intelligent labor and enduring toil from uninhabited deserts into rich fields yielding abundant harvests. Around these isolated monasteries soon sprang up, as around so many centres of life, schools, workshops, and settlements. The wilderness blossomed. And the monks wrote Christianity and civilization on the hearts of the people and on the soil of England. Not to mention the grand literary monuments dedicated to the record of their pious labors by Count Montalembert in his _Monks of the West_, all these victories for humanity are clearly discernible to scores of modern Protestant writers, who have borne eloquent testimony to the noble devotion and glorious services of these holy men, whose real merits have been too long obscured by the historical conspiracy against truth. They have looked behind shells and manuscripts, and found something to reward their search.
Thus Carlyle finds a man behind the old MS. of Jocelin of Brakelond:
“A personable man of seven-and-forty, stout made, stands erect as a pillar; with bushy eyebrows, the face of him beaming into you in a really strange way: the name of him Samson: a man worth looking at.... He was wont to preach to the people in the English tongue, though according to the dialect of Norfolk, where he had been brought up. There preached he: a man worth going to hear.... Abbot Samson built many useful, many pious edifices; human dwellings, churches, steeples, barns;--all fallen now and vanished, but useful while they stood. He built and endowed ‘the Hospital of Babwell’; built ‘fit houses for the St. Edmunsbury schools.’ ... And yet these grim old walls are not a dilettantism and dubiety; they are an earnest fact. It was a most real and serious purpose they were built for? Yes, another world it was, when these black ruins, white in their new mortar and fresh chiselling, first saw the sun as walls, long ago. _Gauge not, with thy dilettante compasses, with that placid dilettante simper, the Heaven’s-Watchtower of our Fathers, the fallen God’s Houses, the Golgotha of true Souls departed”!_