Here, Cistercian monks are working in a stone-walled Leicestershire field, harvesting crops and showing charity to a local child. The title means 'To Work is to Pray'. It suggests the strict rule of life at Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in the distance, the first to have been built in England since the Reformation.

Like Augustus Pugin, the architect of the abbey, Herbert was a Roman Catholic. He shows himself drawing piously in the foreground alongside the Trappist monks. This work vividly evokes the Victorian desire for a return to pre-industrial, religious ways of life in which people worked harmoniously within the landscape.