“It is not good for man to be alone: man is ‘alone’ when he is away from the turmoil of the world; thus monks and holy men build for themselves solitudes. It is not good, says the Lord, for such a man, a contemplative, to be alone, without a companion; it is best that he become active; let us make him a help like unto himself, that is, a people subject to him, who will minister to his temporal, as he to their spiritual needs.”

The contemplative life resembles Paradise before the creation of Eve! Or, to modernize the thought as well as its phrasing: man is meant to express himself in the art of government.

The quotation comes from notes which were taken by students from a lecture on Genesis, delivered in the Paris schools round about the year 1190. The students would apply it to themselves. For the present they were “contemplatives,” if not solitaries; their business, in theory at least, was contemplation which centred in the study of Scripture; and they were all potential bishops. Their lecturer passed dramatically to action from contemplation. From being a master of theology at Paris he was raised to the cardinalate, then to the archbishopric of Canterbury, and “expressed himself” in Magna Carta.