Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

108 ST. DUNSTAN S
worldly things, addicted to games of chance, equal
to, or surpassing, seculars in their love of dress and in
their licentiousness, intent upon food even to shameful
excess, ignorant of letters as if it were a disgrace
to priests to be learned, scarcely knowing the meaning
of the words their sacred calling ordered them
to say so often ". In this state of things any man
courageous enough to set up a high ideal of perfection
would deserve more gratitude than the founder
of a world-wide empire. Yet this is what Dunstan
did by the illustration he gave to monastic life, in
itself a faithful carrying out of the counsels.
*
He
enacted that every see should be filled by a monk or
abbot, who should be able to serve as an example to
his diocesans, pending the time when the secular
clergy awoke to the nature of their sacred vocation.
Dunstan would tolerate no compromises, no halfhearted
attempts to serve God and the flesh ; it was
to be a question of living according to the canons or
< )f expulsion from the service of the altar. He also
opposed to the utmost the slightest violation of matrimony,
justly regarding the purity of Christian
marriage as the tie-beam in the frame-v\ork of
society.
More than forty abbeys owed either their foundation
or their restoration to the action of St. Dunstan
as primate.1 Ely, Peterborough, Thorney, and Mal-
mesbury were restored, whilst the monks formed at
Glastonbury, or put forward by Dunstan's exertions,
1 Christian Schools and Scholars, i. 29(5.