ABSTRACT
A culture has arisen that might not have raised its head at all, and would at least have been far different; better, perhaps, but far more likely worse but for the monks being there to Christianize the order of the earth. Sulpicius is clearly very anxious to show that in S. Martin the West had now a monk who could in every way challenge comparison with the most virile athletes of the East—though his hero was born in that portion of the empire. Thus the last dark days of the falling empire in the West were brightened by the rising light of monasticism. Monasticism in the West was the greatest single constructive force that existed in the world for a thousand years after the fall of Rome. The general atmosphere of the "Life of Martin" is very much the same as that of S. Antony himself. Nearly all the real emphasis is on asceticism.
