They had to learn the true dignity of the Sudra's position, as a "servant." They had to learn to “come down on to the dusty soil" and to "meet him and stand by him, in toil and sweat of their brow."

They had also to learn, as we saw in the last chapter, to "come out of their meditations." They had to give up that lonely, isolated, meditative, monastic life of the Egyptian desert, where selfishness crept into the spirit of asceticism, and the dusty world was left behind in order to save one's own individual soul. This false pathway of asceticism had to be left behind completely before the true ideal of labour could be found.

The Western Church was saved from taking the wrong path by a new monastic movement, which sprang to life, under S. Benedict, during those darkest ages of Europe the centuries of the Barbarian invasions. In the lonely forests of England and Germany and the Tyrol, in the wild tracts of inhospitable lands, the monks of this Benedictine Order lived and laboured, spending their days equally in work and prayer. To them, in that noblest of monastic ideals, work itself was prayer, and prayer itself was work. Through centuries of plunder and rapine and bloodshed, far more terrible than anything that the patient earth had witnessed in Europe before, these monasteries were oases of peaceful labour and devotion in the midst of a howling wilderness.

During these Dark Ages the fair light of humanity seemed almost to have left the earth, and as one old chronicler vividly described it-the people said to one another, "God is dead." In these monasteries, which were scarcely touched by the wild tumult and destruction around, the light of learning and prayer and fruitful toil gleamed forth in unimaginable beauty. Thus, and thus alone, were kept fresh the higher ideals of mankind. The most savage forces of anarchy and passion were restrained by these living examples of quiet peaceful work and self-discipline and prayer.

Painfully and slowly in the West this greatest of all industrial struggles was won. The dignity of labour, which the Roman Empire, with its chained gangs of slave labourers, had altogether lost, was recovered once more for mankind.

The Greek Ambassador Megasthenes, coming from the court of the Seleucid Emperors of the West, noticed in India one remarkable thing. There were no slaves. This appears to have been one of the noblest results of the great early Buddhist religious impulse, which, the more closely we analyse it the more closely reveals to us its own kindred likeness to the first Christian age, when religious life was young and love of humanity was strong in the West. In some future period of historical research, we shall understand what the monasteries of Nalanda and Taxila and a thousand other places did for India, in taming the aboriginal

tribes around them and conquering the barbarians by love and not by massacre and hate. There, too, was an ideal of labour, in those early Buddhist days, which rescued the Sudra and the Chandala and the Panchama, for a time at least, from the contempt of the higher castes and races.

But to return to the West itself. It is a strangely stirring sight to watch the new life flowing back through all the lands of Europe, as the romance and wonder of the Middle Ages begin. Single and separate ideals, from the Gospel story, were passionately held and lived out, with a devotion, incomplete indeed, but of wonderful power.

Through all the first impulse of the monastic movement. renunciation was the one ideal of life, with regard to wealth and worldly goods. In the present century in Europe, it is hard to realize the moving power of this ideal. We can compare with it the struggle which Count Tolstoy had within the bosom of his own family, in our own times, to renounce all and become poor, and how he failed up to the very end to carry his family with him. The many-sided life of Europe seems to leave little room for such a simple solution of the labour problem. It is hard to grasp with our modern imagination a social life in which such complete and instantaneous revolutions continually occurred.

We read, to take one example, how fifteen young German nobles, while intent on a murderous raid, passed the night in the Abbey of Morimond. They are deeply impressed, before they retire to sleep, with the simple poverty of the monks. In the stillness of midnight, the solemn chant rings through the cloister and brings a sudden awe to their wild hearts. The next morning finds them upon their knees before the Abbot Walter, eager to leave their wealth and knightly station for a life of holy poverty as monks.

These great renunciations are not at all uncommon in India, even at the present time. India still lives, deep down in the hearts of her children, in her own "Middle Ages," her Ages of romance and wonder and beauty, her "Ages of Faith." That is her supreme fascination and attraction. I have in mind, as I write, the story of Debendranath Tagore, and how the princely title of his father became changed into one that was more truly regal-Maharshi-Great Rishi. One evening, when the Maharshi was longing to abandon all he had, in his search for God, he came to two chattim trees in the midst of a large open and elevated plain. There, in complete solitude, he spent all the night in the ecstasy of joy and meditation, seeking and finding God, whose wealth is far above all earthly treasure. He stayed there night and day under the two trees, living his life of prayer. The name he gave to the place was Shantiniketan, the Home of Peace. After

a time, the leader-chief of a band of robbers and murderers, who had been the terror of the whole country-side, came to the spot, thinking that the saint was some sadhu, who had concealed beneath the trees a hidden treasure of gold which he was guarding. The robber-leader crept forward, eagerly intent to kill him as he sat in prayer. But when he saw the spiritual beauty of his face and its radiance of joy, his mind in a moment was changed. The robber fell down at the Maharshi's feet and confessed his guilt and became his life-long disciple. To-day, in Shantiniketan itself, the voices of young children echo beneath those same chattim trees, and through the mango groves which have grown up around them. Amid a life from which prayer is never absent, little children learn day by day to work with their own hands and serve in the Ashram. Something of the character of the forest hermitages of olden times still remains. India has not forgotten her past.

It is true that, in Europe, as also in India, the desire for wealth has returned again and again, even under the cloak of religion. Under the specious form of sacred property, dedicated to God, this greed for wealth brought decay to the monastic orders. But the faith in the ideal was never lost. In wonderful succession, new monastic orders rose above the ruins of the old, each more sternly severe in its renunciation than its predecessor. When at last the monastic ideal