The lives of the English saints - 1908 Author:John Henry Newman Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II STEPHEN AT MOLESME Stephen was returning from his pilgrimage with his faithful companion, probably on his way back to Sherborne, when God conduc... more »ted his steps to the place which was to be the scene of his labours. As he was travelling through a dark forest in the diocese of Langres in Burgundy,1 he came to a poor monastery situated on the side of a sloping hill, on the right bank of the little river Leignes. It could hardly be called a monastery, for it was a collection of huts, built by the monks themselves, of the boughs of trees, which they had cut down with their own hands, surrounding a small wooden oratory. Around this little knot of huts, more like an encampment than a settled dwelling, was an open space in the forest, which the monks had cleared, and which had been given them by a neighbouring baron. The brethren had no means of subsistence but the produce of this piece of ground, which they tilled with their own hands, and they were as much dependent upon it as the poorest serf who gained his own livelihood by thesweat of his brow; yet amongst this poor brotherhood were men of noble birth and of high intellectual attainments. The monastery had only been established a short time, and was struggling with all the difficulties which beset an infant community. Its history is a curious one, as showing how the reckless fury of the times was beaten down by an element of good even more energetic than the evil which it had to encounter. Two brothers of noble birth were one day riding through a solitary place in a forest not far from Molesme, called the Forest of Golan ; both were armed, for they were riding to take part in a tournament,—a species of festivity, which with all its pageantry, its flutter of pennons and glittering of armour, was soon after condemned in ...« less