Excerpt from The Monks of the West, Vol. 5 of 6: From St. Benedict to St. Bernard It was not meet, however, that the work so bravely sacrificed should be altogether thrown away. The critics to whom M. De Montalembert had submitted his work, and the severity of his own judgment of it, concerned only the first portion - the First Book of the printed volume. The rise and early days of the Monastic Orders had seemed to their historian to be described too briefly: the portico had been judged too narrow for the proportions of the edifice. Thus, all the substance of the four hundred pages composing the First Book appears in the volumes of the Monks of the West now given to the public. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.