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BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME 
 FROM THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 Hcnrg W. Sage 
 
 1891 
 
 AJ^(pS:H:Hr. GyfJL./^.:^.. 
 
PUBLISHED BY 
 
 JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS, GLASGOW, 
 13ublislurs to the Qmbcrsity. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LONDON AND NEW YORK. 
 
 London, Si7npkin, Hamilton and Co. 
 
 Cambridge, Macmillan aiid. Bowes. 
 Edinburgh, Douglas and Fonlis. 
 
 MDCCCXCIIT. 
 
STOICS AND SAINTS 
 
 LECTURES ON THE LATER HEATHEN MORALISTS, AND 
 
 ON SOME ASPECTS OF THE LIFE OF THE 
 
 MEDIEVAL CHURCH. 
 
 BY THE LATE 
 
 JAMES BALDWIN BROWN, B.A., 
 
 M IN ISTER OF BRIXTON INDEPENDENT CHURCH. 
 
 AUTHOR OF 'THE HIGHRR" LIFR,' * FIRST PRINCIPLES OF ECCLESIASTICAL TRUTH,' 
 
 ETC., ETC. 
 
 ' The fountain of all human progress, of all human 
 
 hope, is the living presence of God in and 
 
 with the world.' 
 
 J. B. B. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1893. 
 
NOTE BY THE EDITOR. 
 
 The Lectures contained in this volume were delivered at 
 different times and in various places during the later years of 
 Mr. Baldwin Brown's life, and if that life had been prolonged 
 he would himself have prepared them for the press. They 
 are now published at the earnest desire of many who heard 
 them, with but slight alteration, the characteristic freedom 
 of a spoken address being purposely retained. Though not 
 originally given in one course, the Lectures are essentially 
 related in their leading ideas and method of treatment, and 
 are arranged chronologically as a consecutive series. 
 
 Certain portions of the fifth Lecture were included in an 
 essay on ' The Eeligious Life,' in ' Ecclesia ' (first series), and 
 are reproduced here by kind permission of the publishers. 
 With that exception all that is contained in the book appears 
 now for the first time. 
 
 E. B. B. 
 
 St. Lawrenoe-on-Sba, Kent, 
 October 1893. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTUEE I. . 
 
 The Later Age of Greek Philosophy and the Epicurean and 
 
 Stoic Schools, 1 
 
 LECTUEE IL " 
 "Epictetus and the Last Effort of the Heathen Philosophy, 26 
 
 LECTUEE III. - 
 
 ' Marcds Aurelids, and the Approximation of the Heathen to 
 
 THE Christian Schools, 49 
 
 LECTUEE IV. ^ 
 Why could not the Stoic Eegenerate Society? 71 
 
 LECTUEE V. 
 
 The Monastic System, and its Eelation to the Life of the 
 
 Church, <j3 
 
 LECTUEE VL 
 St. Bernard, the Monastic Saint, ] M) 
 
Vm CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 LECTUEE VII. 
 
 - - St. Thomas of Canterbury ; the Saint as Ecclesiastical 
 
 Statesman, 171 
 
 LECTURE VIII. 
 ^ ^ St. Francis of Assisi, and the Rise of the Mendicant Orders, 201 
 
 LECTURE IX. 
 ^ ^ St. Louis of France ; the Saint in Secular Life, 235 
 
 LECTURE X. 
 ' ' John Wtclif, and tile Dawn of the Reformation, 265 
 
 Index, 293 
 
THE LATER AGE OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY AND THE 
 EPICUREAN AND STOIC SCHOOLS. 
 
I. 
 
 THE LATER AGE OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY AND THE 
 EPICUREAN AND STOIC SCHOOLS. 
 
 It needed the insight of a consummate genius like Socrates 
 to see that man was really the centre of the world. The 
 Cosmos is on so grand a scale, its spaces are so immense, its 
 forces are so terrible, that man seems but a helpless, noteless 
 pigmy in its midst. It was but natural that the first 
 beginnings of Philosophy, that is, of man's thought about 
 things, including himself, should be concerned with the 
 universe ; with the mystery of its genesis, the secret of its 
 order, the meaning of its life. The earlier sages set them- 
 selves to guess the solution of the mystery. One thought 
 fire was the fundamental principle, another moisture, and 
 so on through the elements. Each sought to discover 
 the secret of the unity of the creation, persuaded that 
 under infinite variety such unity existed, if man could but 
 discover its principle ; and this, the earliest quest of man, 
 is the quest of science through all the ages, which it is 
 painfully pursuing still. Man still has before him in his 
 path of discovery the vision of 
 
 ' One God, one law, one element, 
 And one far-off divine event, 
 To -whicli the ■whole creation moves' ; 
 
 and this vision, science and theology, working together not 
 in impious antagonism but in holy concord, will one day 
 make real 
 
4 LATER GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 It is significant that these early sages mostly dwelt under 
 the sceptre of the great Asiatic despotism, where man was 
 but a human atom, of slight account for all the higher 
 purposes of intelligent and responsible existence, and 
 where speculations on the vast system of the Cosmos 
 around him would be the first natural exercise of man's 
 intellect and imagination, the despot assuming the whole 
 outward government of his life. CSocrates marks the dawn 
 of a new era. He transferred the centre of gravity of 
 Philosophy absolutely and finally to Man^ He saw that, 
 as far as this earth was concerned, man was the final end 
 of the creation ; man who, while he could search the secret 
 things of the Cosmos around him and master the key to 
 its methods, could himself become creator in the intellectual 
 and political spheres. And Socrates, it must be remembered 
 was a citizen of a free poKtical community, as men understood 
 freedom in those days, when all the hard work of the world 
 was done by slaves. Socrates as a thinker made man the 
 centre of his system, but Socrates, as the citizen of Athens, 
 found man the centre of a very large, free, and noble activity, 
 and developed to a pitch of individual culture and dignity, 
 which, as characteristic of a whole community, is still unr 
 matched in the history of the world. 
 
 Man was of slight account individually on the sea boards 
 of Asia Minor, when Thales began his speculations about 
 the world-system around him. Man individually and in his 
 political relations was of immense account in Athens, and 
 Athens was herself the free and energetic head of a great 
 movement which was changing visibly the destinies of the 
 civilised world. When Socrates was born, the excitement of 
 that splendid struggle for human liberty, which at Salamis 
 wrested the sceptre of civilisation from Asia and transferred 
 it to Europe, was still vivid and inspiring. Athenian freemen 
 had done a deed unmatched for daring heroism in the earth's 
 
THE ATHENS OF SOCRATES. 5 
 
 annals, and it was a deed that, as Socrates grew to manhood, 
 was clearly giving a new form to human history. The century 
 which followed the crowning victory of Salamis was at Athens, 
 in point of political activity and intellectual and imaginative 
 production, the most brilliant upon record. The world has 
 never seen a community, each member of which was cultivated 
 to such a pitch of intellectual acuteness and political judgment 
 as that commonalty of Athens. An Athenian in those days, 
 the days of ^schylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, 
 Pericles, Pheidias, Socrates and Plato ; a citizen of a city in 
 whose life he was not only expected but as a rule able to 
 take part ; one who was called to sit in judgment on the 
 nft)st brilliant leaders, thinkers and artists of the world, 
 might well deem that there was something in man, in his 
 faculty, in his energy, in his capacity for development, in 
 his manifest destiny, through which he could claim all the 
 forces of the physical creation as his ministers, and which 
 gave him the right and the power to examine all external 
 things in the light of the ideas which were enshrined within. 
 
 Socrates, born and nursed in the midst of the splendid 
 energy and activity of that Athenian commonwealth, gathered 
 and expressed the great lesson of its life. He busied himself 
 entirely with man. With the physical theories which occupied 
 his predecessors he had no concern. They were mere guesses 
 having their main interest in the search after unity which they 
 revealed. Man, as a being with a capacity for knowing the 
 truth, for discriminating the real nature of things from the 
 false or partial conceptions which uncultivated human nature 
 is prone to form of them ; man, as a being capable of entering 
 into very high and noble relations with his fellows, and of 
 living by the help of wisdom a very perfect and beautiful 
 life, was the theme of his constant investigation; on this he 
 bent the energies of one of the keenest and most subtle in- 
 tellects that man was ever endowed with, and the force of 
 
6 LATER GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 a moral nature, a will and a conscience, which are peerless 
 in the heathen world. To make men wise was his life-long 
 endeavour; to destroy the idola, the false ideas of things 
 which he found them cherishing, and to substitute the true. 
 The discovery of truth with a view to conduct, so as to make 
 the individual worth more to himself and to the State, was 
 the aim of his wonderful dialectic ; for man was always con- 
 ceived of and treated by him as a member of a community, 
 a being in relation to his fellow beings, whose line of duty 
 was marked out by the public life of his day. The condition 
 of such a career as that of Socrates, with such an aim, was 
 the existence of a very noble, free, and large public life in 
 the community which he sought to lead into the ways "of 
 wisdom ; a life full of energy, purpose and hope. 
 
 His country, teeming as it was with brilliant energy and 
 activity, could not bear his searching uncompromising examin- 
 ation of its ideas, its principles, and its aims. As befell a 
 greater than Socrates, it cast him out and slew him. Thence- 
 forth the story of Athens is a story of decline and decay. It 
 need not be thought that the decay of Athens was the judg- 
 ment of God on the martyrdom of her great teacher. God's 
 most dread judgments are the stern execution of His laws. 
 But as a fact, from the days of Socrates the course of 
 Athenian history was one of rapid degradation ; then followed 
 the rise of Macedon to supremacy in Greece, the victories 
 of Alexander, the division of his vast empire among his 
 generals, and the final extinction of the liberties of Athens, 
 which lost all political dignity and independence, while 
 remaining the intellectual centre of the world. 
 
 There are few things in history more humiliating than 
 the life of Athens as a State during the Macedonian era, 
 tossed about as she was from conqueror to conqueror, and 
 indulging in slavish adulation of them all. There are pas- 
 sages in Plutarch's Life of Demetrius Poliorcetes, the most 
 
DECLINE OF ATHENIAN LIFE. 7 
 
 brilliant, though the most inconstant and profligate of the 
 Graeco- Asiatic rulers, that afford graphic illustrations of the 
 degradation to which Athens had sunk in the days in which 
 the Epicureans and the Stoics arose. We have even pre- 
 served to us a hymn of divine honour addressed to this prince 
 by the Athenians.^ By this time the public life of Athena, 
 which had been her glory, had utterly perished. Men were 
 cut rudely adrift from that which had been their guide and 
 law, the public opinion of their State. There was no State ; 
 the brutal hand of war had aboHshed all political inde- 
 pendence throughout the whole world of which Greece was 
 the centre ; there was no fixity in any political arrange- 
 ments ; one day Athens belonged to Demetrius, the next to 
 Cassander, just as the fortune of war decreed, while the- 
 citizens, who once wielded a wide and splendid empire, were 
 the sport of the caprices and the insults of their despots. 
 The wealth too of the city was dissipated by the constant 
 inconstancy of the pohtical combinations in which it was 
 included. Its trade decayed, its genial youth was drawn off, 
 not for patriotic expeditions but to man the mercenary armies 
 which for many generations filled the Graeco- Oriental world 
 with confusion and slaughter. 
 
 In such a condition of society, amid the clash of arms and 
 the struggles of contending despots, the noble quest of the 
 elder Philosophy for the True, the Beautiful, the Good, passed 
 utterly away. Within a generation of their deaths, the works 
 of Plato and Aristotle had almost ceased to occupy the atten- 
 tion of their countrymen, and new Schools, new Sects as they 
 were well called, with new questions and new dogmas, were 
 in possession of the field. The man of whom and with whom 
 Socrates discoursed was emphatically a citizen, a man in 
 whose thoughts devotion to the State was uppennost. These 
 were days when Athenians were too busy with the duties and 
 
 ' Athenseus, vi. 63. 
 
a LATEE GEEEK PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 responsibilities of their absorbing public cares to think much 
 about happiness, or indeed to think much about themselves at 
 all. They were citizens first and men afterwards ; the indi- 
 vidual in those days had hardly disentangled his individuality 
 from the State of which he was a member, so as to realise that 
 he was a man, with personal responsibilities, experiences, and 
 destinies, which no one else could share. In the palmy days 
 of Athens, when Pericles ruled and Socrates taught, a man 
 thought as a citizen, wrought as a citizen, and philosophised as 
 a citizen ; and except in his relations as a citizen he would 
 have found himself utterly at sea in the conduct of his life. 
 
 In still earlier stages of civilisation, in the tribe, a man is 
 hardly a person. He is like the limb or organ of a greater 
 body, his tribe ; and out of that unity he is nought. Now 
 there is something which is not without beauty and nobleness 
 in this earliest form of human society, in which the man 
 hardly realises his ' self ' except in relation to his fellows. 
 But as society progresses and rises towards the higher stages, 
 this primitive order of things breaks up and vanishes. Man 
 has to be placed under the strongest stimulus to personal 
 development ; he has to be stirred and trained to understand 
 his relations and duties as a personal being, as the condition of 
 his entering into the highest and most fruitful relations with 
 his fellow men in the State and in the Church. He must be 
 made to feel his individual relations, primarily to God and 
 then to his fellows, and thus only can State life and Church 
 life put on their finest forms and bear their most perfect fruits. 
 This is the end at which Christianity aims. It will isolate 
 men first, press on them the duties and responsibilities of their 
 individual being, lead them to cry, as if it were the one concern 
 for them m the universe, ' What must I do to be saved,' and 
 then, when their whole nature, body, soul and spirit, is in full 
 development and activity, it will create out of the union of 
 these individuals a higher condition of society than the primi- 
 
GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM. 9 
 
 tive form of human relations could possibly Ijave secured. 
 The highest state possible to a community is attained when 
 there is a principle brought to bear that, on the one hand, 
 gives to the man the strongest stimulus to individual develop- 
 ment, and, on the other, compacts most closely his relations 
 with his fellow men. The Jew in the old world made an 
 approximation to this condition within the limits of his 
 national life. God's commandment was addressed to him from 
 the first as a person, one who had personal relations with the 
 invisible and eternal, while the tie which bound together the 
 individuals of the race, remains the strongest nexus of man to 
 man which even to this day is known to history. The pro- 
 blem, How this condition is to be realised for humanity at 
 large, is the problem which has been solved by Christianity. 
 The object of Christianity is to ' present every man perfect,' 
 while at the same time it links him closely to the brotherhood 
 of the Universal Church. 
 
 That process of individuahsation, if we may so call it, 
 which was accomplished nobly for the Jew by the Eevela- 
 tion of the Divine law, and for man at large by the Advent, 
 was achieved more painfully for the Greek by all the strife, 
 degradation and misery of the generations of Hellenic decay. 
 When the hberty of Athens was destroyed, the citizen had 
 no longer a State to live for; patriotism died down for 
 want of a country to love. It was in Athens that a 
 teacher of the New Academy declared that a philosopher 
 would not much trouble himself if his country were enslaved. 
 Athens was enslaved, or such a thought would never have 
 occurred to an Athenian moralist. But liberty being lost, 
 poKtical life being utter humiliation, the strong hand and 
 the brutal will ruling everywhere, mercenary soldiering having 
 supplanted patriotic military service, there being no principle 
 anywhere to fight for, and no empire of tolerable dignity 
 to serve, men fell back upon themselves. At any rate, they 
 
10 LATER GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 said to themselves, amid the universal impoverishment and 
 misery, I am here, a living being, with a wonderful capacity 
 for enjoying and suffering, and I must look to myself, and 
 enjoy, as far as I may, my own individual life. Then arose 
 that new philosophical question as to personal conduct and 
 happiness which gave birth to the Epicurean and Stoic 
 Schools, and for the next three hundred years occupied the 
 whole field of PhiLosophy ; for even with the Sceptic, who 
 asserted that nothing could be certainly known, the funda- 
 mental consideration was a quiet life. 
 
 The question of happiness as the aim of life first comes 
 to the front in the Ethics of Aristotle, and its appearance is 
 the sign of the changed condition of public affairs. In 
 Aristotle's days, in fact, the State was already in decadence. 
 But Aristotle's ' happiness ' was a noble and beautiful idea. 
 It was the energetic play of all man's best and highest 
 powers in their proper tasks. The strain of effort and 
 the sense of victorious achievement were its factors ; the 
 happy man was the man whose whole nature was in full 
 activity about its noblest work. But the question had 
 come to have a much narrower meaning in the days when 
 the Epicureans and the Stoics appeared. Noble work was 
 then a hard thing to find ; great ideas had been banished 
 from the minds of men ; great principles ceased to influence 
 the movements of societies. On aU sides there was a scramble 
 of selfishness, and it was the selfish idea of happiness, the 
 passive idea, that was uppermost in the minds of men 
 when these sects arose. How a man could get his bit of 
 happiness for himself and enjoy it — it was all that was 
 left to him — was the main theme of Philosophy till the 
 Gospel ' Whosoever will come after me, let him deny him- 
 self, and take up his cross, and follow me,' was preached to 
 the world. 
 
 Let us understand that it is a very necessary process, ' 
 
THE SUCCESSOES OF SOCRATES. 11 
 
 this distinction of the individual man from the community 
 
 his extrication as a being with personal responsibilities and 
 destinies, from the family, tribe, or state, with which in the 
 earlier stages of his development his life is bound up. This 
 extrication from the communal life, this differentiation, so 
 to speak, is the first condition of man's advance to the 
 higher grades of civilisation, in which with his fully realised 
 and developed manhood he will enter into higher forms of 
 political combination with his fellows, and fill a larger and 
 nobler sphere. It may be said this is a development of 
 selfishness; in a sense, yes. It is the full unfolding of 
 Self, but not for Self. The man who, under a strong sense 
 of personal misery, is moved to cry out for his own salva- 
 tion, is the man who comes ultimately to think least of self, 
 and to devote his powers most resolutely to his fellow men. 
 This disentanglement of the individual man with his personal 
 interests and needs, was distinctly in the Divine order of 
 the progress of Society. But at first it took a low and 
 selfish form. Neither Stoic nor Epicurean could carry the 
 development up to its ultimate stage, in which the higher 
 self becomes the servant and minister of man, in which the 
 happiness of the personal being is found in ministering to 
 the happiness of others. For that another and a better Gospel 
 was needed, and that too was sent. It is Christianity alone, 
 which, while applying the strongest possible impulse to man's 
 individual development, and pressing on him most solemnly 
 the interests of his own being, binds him in bonds of 
 closest brotherhood to his fellow men. ISTevertheless, though 
 under conditions they understood not, Stoic and even Epi- 
 curean were preparing the way for the Gospel. 
 
 It has been remarked that Plato and Aristotle were them- 
 selves soon well nigh forgotten in that Greece of which 
 they were' the intellectual glory; and yet it is wonderful 
 to note, how the Sects lived upon the crumbs of the table 
 
12 LATER GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 of the Socratic School. Socrates was the starting point 
 of all the younger philosophies. 
 
 The first in order of the Sects was that of the Cynics, 
 whose founder Antisthenes appeared soon after the death 
 of Socrates, and of whom Diogenes in his tub is the far- 
 famed representative. We can hardly call Cynicism a 
 philosophy, it was rather a habit of life, and it was founded 
 on the well-known contempt of Socrates for external things, 
 his indifference to ease or pain, want or fulness, life or death. 
 But in Socrates this noble contempt of externals was but 
 the accident of his intense pursuit of higher things. The 
 Cynics took the accident, as the Quakers took what was 
 accidental in George Fox's life, and made it the basis of 
 their discipline. In their hands it became a hard ascetic 
 doctrine, which continued to attract its votaries for 500 
 years, and handed down some legacies to the ascetic school 
 in the Christian Church. 
 
 The next in order of development were the Sceptics, 
 founded by the celebrated Pyrrho of Elis, who has been 
 the eponymus of the Sceptic schools through all time. It 
 is probable that a misinterpretation of the Socratic method 
 was at the root of Pyrrhonism in its first inception. 
 The form of the Socratic dialogue suggested how much 
 was to be said on both sides of a question, and how hard 
 it was to come at the truth. To every statement there 
 is an answer ; to every reason a counter reason ; while 
 Socrates constantly professed that he knew nothing, and 
 bent the whole strength of his keen intellect to prove to 
 all who conversed with him that they were in the same 
 case. Pyrrhonism could not see that it was just the in- 
 tensity of his conviction that truth might be known, which 
 made him so ruthless in destroying refuges of lies and 
 refuges of half-truths in himself and others. Pyrrhonism 
 did see that Socrates found very much to be said both for 
 
PYRRHO THE SCEPTIC. 13 
 
 and against the propositions he discussed; that the great 
 master Aristotle had set himself in many vital points against 
 Plato, and that both had passed away and had left no 
 settled body of truth. Pyrrho too had travelled far; had 
 been in India with Alexander ; had talked with Brahmins, 
 and studied the manners of distant lands. It appeared to 
 him as the result of all that the safest way was to doubt 
 of everything ; to adhere to the maxim that to every reason 
 an equal reason may be opposed ; to keep the mind in ab- 
 solute suspense about all propositions, and absolutely im- 
 perturbable by all the influences of the external world. We 
 know nothing about anything. This thing is white, we 
 say — we mean that it seems what we call white, but what 
 it is who can tell. And as to imperturbability, it was said 
 that nothing would make Pyrrho halt or hasten ; he would 
 not leave the road to escape being run over by a carriage 
 or bitten by a dog — this is doubtless a joke at his expense, 
 but it shews the temper which he set himself to cultivate. 
 His manner of life was much admired ; his fellow citizens 
 made him high priest, which reveals something significant 
 about them as well as about him. His doctrine was how- 
 ever too deathly cold, and his manner of Ufe was too utterly 
 cheerless for anything hke wide acceptance among his fellows. 
 It is true that the same dreary asceticism makes itself seen 
 in Christendom, but then it had at the heart of it a burning 
 enthusiastic love, which made it, in the monk, a thing of 
 quite another sphere. Pyrrho could see nothing within 
 him, above him, around him, to kindle enthusiasm. His 
 system was, as has been said, deathly cold, and the 
 multitude shrank from it, though it continued to reappear 
 in force, at intervals, in the history of Philosophy, and was 
 found, nay is found — we have not done with it yet — an 
 instrument of no little power in breaking down and breaking 
 up systems of thought that have outlived their work. An 
 
14 LATER GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 age of dogmatism never fails to lead on to an age of scepticism, 
 which does judgment on its dogmas and torments its dis- 
 ciples ; but in the ' everlasting No,' no age can rest. Pyrrho 
 himself confessed ' It is hard to strip off the man.' On the 
 humanity of human nature, which is constant through the 
 ages, many a proud system goes to wreck. 
 
 It was in the midst of this Cynicism as to manners and 
 morals, and Scepticism as to truth, that the Epicureans and 
 Stoics began to rebuild the lapsed structure of Philosophy. 
 It is to be noted that with Pyrrho too, as with them, the one 
 question was happiness. He doubted of everything and 
 maintained an impassive imperturbability — we will not call 
 it serenity, serenity belongs to a higher sphere — because he 
 thought he should be happier in doing so. It was the one 
 attraction of Scepticism ; it freed him from the pain and the 
 trouble of any overmastering, imperious thought. Indeed this 
 concern about the every day interests and happiness of men, 
 which became the key note of the philosophy of the Sects, ran 
 through the whole scale of Ufe in those days. Men turned 
 their thoughts in upon themselves. Imagine the horror with 
 which an Athenian of the noble days of Athens would have 
 heard Carneades tell Clitomachus that he thought a philoso- 
 pher would not be greatly troubled if his country were 
 conquered ! In the dramatic literatm-e of the time the same 
 spirit reigns. In the old comedy Aristophanes had the 
 citizen always on the stage; all the interest of the drama 
 was political; all the jokes and sarcasms were pointed at 
 political persons or political doings. Aristophanes is a sealed 
 book to those who are not familiar with the public life of his 
 day. But in Menander, in the comedy of the time of whicli 
 we are now speaking, politics are never alluded to. All is 
 personal and domestic; the woes of lovers, the tricks of 
 slaves, the knaveries of tradesmen, the intrigues of wives 
 occupy the whole stage. We have already seen that in one 
 
THE SEARCH FOE, HAPPINESS. 15 
 
 sense this was a development ; a development provided there 
 was a further progress beyond. If it had ended there, if it 
 had only substituted the self-enfolded man for the citizen 
 prepared to serve as judge, to legislate, to fight and to die for 
 his country, it would have been an utter and fatal degrada- 
 tion. But if the man thus isolated and made conscious of his 
 personal interests and responsibilities, could be taken hold of 
 by some loftier discipline, if educated in this way to a higher 
 point he could be brought into new and more fruitful 
 relations with his feUows, then it might be a very valuable 
 step in the unfolding of the destinies of the human world. 
 That 'if Christianity answered; that discipline the Gospel 
 of Jesus and the Eesurrection supplied. 
 
 Epicurean and Stoic occupied themselves with this same 
 question, How shall a man secure his personal happiness ? 
 So far they were twin shoots out of the same stem. And let 
 it be added that there was a latent scepticism in both of 
 them, though they rose in protest against Scepticism, and 
 tried to supply a positive rule of life to man, based on a 
 certain view of the order of the world. They were both in 
 their main attitude defensive. They had no deep belief in the 
 Tightness and the goodness of the system of things around 
 them ; and their secret thought was to arm themselves 
 against it to the utmost of their power. Possessed by this 
 inner scepticism about the capacity of man to arrive at 
 truth, and the duty of man to search for it, they neither of 
 them cared for the pursuit of truth for its own sake. Dialec- 
 tic they utterly despised. They sought to know what would 
 make for happiness, and cared for nothing beyond. But yet 
 they were not sceptics. An utter sceptic may have a rule of 
 Kfe, and a very good one as far as it goes. But when a man 
 bases his rule of life on what he can discern of the order of the 
 world, however insufficient, however false, his notion may be, 
 he rises out of Scepticism, and has earned a title to the sacred 
 
16 LATER GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 name of Philosopher. Epicurus even did not say nothing can 
 be known, he believed that something could be known ; a 
 miserable something, we feel, but still he believed it to be 
 truth, and on it he grounded his system and his life, 
 
 One cannot help finding considerable charm in what is 
 known of Epicurus and his company. It is little enough ; but 
 it differs generically from what we know of the other philo- 
 sophers. Epicurus, it will be remembered, is the only one of 
 the old heathen teachers who gave his name to his Sect. They 
 were always known as Epicureans. It is not without meaning 
 that we speak of Epicurus and ' his company.' He gathered a 
 body of friends around him, with whom he lived in the closest 
 fellowship and who regarded him with reverential love. In 
 the Garden where they met were gathered what in outward 
 aspect looked more like a company of Christian Ccenobites 
 in the early monastic days, than anything which we meet 
 with in Greek society. Epicurus must have been a man of 
 singular charm of manner, and singular moderation of temper 
 His disciples loved him with a perfect affection, and it is said 
 that they had pictures of Epicurus in their rooms and their 
 bed chambers, and even on their rings and their plate. One 
 ' fell down at his feet,' and did him reverence. Even to 
 Lucretius, a man of the loftiest genius, his master Epicurus 
 seems a grander and more beneficial being than any of the 
 gods whom his countrymen held in reverence. The personal 
 devotion of the disciples to the master was conspicuous and 
 beautiful ; we find nothing parallel to it in the history of the 
 Stoic School. ' When the stranger,' writes Seneca — himself 
 an ardent Stoic, though he always does justice to Epicurus — 
 ' comes to the garden on which the words are inscribed, 
 " Friend, here it will be well for thee to abide, for here pleasure 
 is the highest good," he will find the keeper of that garden a 
 kindly hospitable man, who will set before him a dish of 
 
THE 'PLEASURE' OP EPICURUS. 17 
 
 barley porridge and water in plenty, and say ' Hast thou not 
 been well entertained ? These gardens do not whet hunger 
 but quench it; they do not cause a greater thirst by the very 
 drinks that they afford, but soothe it by a remedy which is 
 natural and costs nothing. In pleasure like this I have grown 
 old.'^ 'Epicurus/ said ^lian, 'cried and said, "To whom a 
 little is not enough, nothing is enough. Give me a barley 
 cake and water and I am ready to vie even with Zeus in 
 happiness.'" 2 ' Send me,' he writes himself to a friend, ' some 
 cheese of Cythnos, that when I will I may fare sumptuously.' ^ 
 
 That these temperate habits were honest and well-auth- 
 enticated, the comic poets by their jokes at them testify. 
 ' Your water drinking,' says a character in a play, ' makes 
 you useless to the State ; whilst by my potations I increase 
 the revenue.' Another says, ' This fellow is bringing in a 
 new. philosophy, he preaches hunger and his disciples follow 
 him. They get but a single roll, a dried fig to relish it and 
 water to wash it down.' 
 
 Now as the avowed principle of Epicurus was pleasure, 
 and the sensations were all that he knew in man, it is 
 natural that there should have been animated controversy 
 about the temperance and purity of the life in that Garden 
 of Epicurus, where ' pleasure was the highest good.' There 
 were women there too belonging to the company, women it 
 would seem of considerable grace and attractiveness. Scandal 
 was busy with their names. There was a curious collection 
 of letters published by a certain Stoic, a bitter enemy of the 
 Epicureans, purporting to have passed between Epicurus 
 and Leontium, the best known of the women who fre- 
 quented the Garden, and others, and these suggest grave 
 doubts as to the morality of the association. But the 
 genuineness of these epistles has been severely questioned, and 
 we should probably be safe in believing them forgeries. 
 
 ' Epist., 21. 10. 2 Yarim Histonce, IV. 13. ^Diog. Laert., X. 11. 
 
 B 
 
18 LATER GEEEK PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 The question can never be decisively settled ; and a garden 
 which has over its portal the words, 'here pleasure is the 
 highest good,' gives at once some colour to scandal. On the 
 other hand, the morality of the sect was always stoutly 
 asserted by the Epicureans and seems to have been generally 
 believed by their contemporaries. It appears indeed clear 
 that if sensuality, in the coarse sense of the term, had been 
 the ' pleasure ' of Epicurus, and excess the law of the life 
 in the company of the Garden, the beautiful reverent homage 
 which they rendered to their master when living, and to 
 his memory when dead, would have been poisoned in its 
 springs. The community could never have held together 
 so long in unity on the basis of indulgence ; and there are 
 moreover some unquestioned letters of Epicurus which seem 
 to be conclusive against the darker charges urged against 
 him by his foes. There have come to light at Herculaneum 
 certain mutilated documents relating to Epicurus and his 
 school, and in a portion of a letter thus recovered there 
 are some words addressed apparently by Epicurus to the 
 daughter of his chief disciple Metrodorus and this very 
 Leontium, a young girl for whose welfare he took thought 
 on his death-bed. It runs thus : — ' "We have arrived safe 
 and sound at Lampsacus, I and Pythocles and Hermarchus 
 and Ctesippus, and there we found Themista and the rest 
 of our friends safe and sound. I hope that you, too, are 
 well, and Mamma, and that in all things you are obedient 
 to her and to Papa and Matro, as you used to be. For 
 remember, my bairn, that we are all of us very fond of 
 you — so be obedient to them.'^ 
 
 We can hardly think that a man of impure heart and 
 impure life would have written that letter. In the epistles 
 of Epicurus too, as given by Diogenes Laertius, there are 
 the most gentle and wise rebukes of errors and faults, which 
 
 ^ Translated in Wallace's Epicureanism, Lond. 1S80, p. 60. 
 
THE SOCIETY OF THE GARDEN. 19 
 
 shew a tenderness, a courtesy, and yet a firmness, which 
 negative the supposition that the Garden was the home of 
 vicious delights. In truth the letters of Epicurus must 
 have been very remarkable documents. There was a col- 
 lection of them extant in the second century of our era, and 
 its loss is very deeply to be regretted. They were preserved 
 and handed down by the disciples from generation to gene- 
 ration, as carefully as the letters of St. Paul were handed 
 down in the Christian Church. Many acute scholars have 
 observed some outward similarity between the two sets of 
 documents. In one sense, the highest, St. Paul and Epicurus 
 are at the opposite poles ; but there is noticeable likeness in 
 the manner of their letters. There are the same urbanity, the 
 same playful irony, the same mixture of exhortations about 
 the smallest personal and the largest moral questions, and 
 the same earnest desire for the welfare of those addressed, 
 according to the conception of each as to the true conditions 
 of the welfare of the human soul. The likeness must not 
 be pressed too far even as to externals ; still it is there ; we 
 may say that as a writer of pastoral epistles Epicurus has 
 a certain superficial likeness to St. Paul. 
 
 And yet, on the other hand, there was nothing in his 
 doctrine, or rather in the principles on which his doctrine 
 rested, however much there may have been in his personal 
 influence, to withhold his followers from the basest sensuality. 
 His doctrine was one of temperance, of a very noble tem- 
 perance ; but there was nothing behind it to sustain it but the 
 individual nature and will of the man. Pleasure is the chief 
 good, sensation is the only guide to reality, the only assurance 
 of truth. There is no law or rule above us, we have simply to 
 guide our course by what we feel, though we must interpret 
 our feelings by our faculty of judgment that enables us to 
 compare experiences and conclude which is the best. In a 
 letter addressed to Menceceus, which is very valuable as giving 
 
20 LATER GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 his own exposition of his system, he lays down in the following 
 words his doctrine about pleasure : — 
 
 When we say tlien, that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean 
 the pleasures of the prodigal, or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are 
 understood by some who are either ignorant and prejudiced for other 
 views, or inclined to misinterpret our statements. By pleasure, we mean 
 the absence of pain in the body and trouble in the soul. It is not an 
 unbroken succession of drinking feasts and of revelry, nor the pleasures 
 of sexual love, nor the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a 
 splendid table, wdrich produce a pleasant life ; it is sober reasoning, 
 searching out the reasons for every choice and avoidance, and banishing 
 those beliefs through which greatest tumults take possession of the soul. 
 Of all this, the beginning, and the greatest good, is prudence. Wherefore 
 prudence is a more precious thing even than philosophy ; from it grow 
 all the other virtues, for it teaches that we cannot lead a life of pleasure 
 which is not also a life of prudence, honour, and justice ; nor lead a life of 
 prudence, honour, and justice which is not also a life of pleasure. For the 
 virtues have grown into one with a pleasant life, and a pleasant life Ls 
 inseparable from them.^ 
 
 There can be no c[uestion that Epicurus advocated per- 
 sistently the bringing reason to bear on the choice of pleasure, 
 and that he saw clearly that many pleasures, most exquisite 
 while they lasted, caused more trouble by anxiety, perturba- 
 tion, and longing than they were worth. He saw too that the 
 pleasure of the flesh, the crap^, was but momentary, while the 
 higher pleasures of the mind took in past, present, and future. 
 But whence, upon his theory, he derived his mind or reason, it 
 is by no means easy to say. The scheme, of course, had vast 
 flaws and fallacies ; these however did not trouble the philoso- 
 pher, so long as it gave him, what he alone cared for, a 
 working hypothesis for the conduct of life. The effort to 
 elaborate a connected and harmonious system he would have 
 condemned as harassing. Though he was an indefatigable and 
 copious writer, he would have said with the Preacher, Much 
 study is a weariness to the flesh. ' Comparison and reflection,' 
 he says, ' are the foe of pleasure. You must be able to throw 
 
 ^Diog. Laert., X. 122 f. 
 
COSMIC THEORIES OP EPICURUS. 21 
 
 yourself wholly into what the moment presents, as if the 
 moment were eternity with no before or after. When another 
 moment comes, treat it in like manner.' But with him mind 
 was but a finer matter, susceptible to more delicate impres- 
 sions. All things, he said, reviving the atomic theory of 
 Democritus, consist of molecules of matter in constant motion, 
 iir various degrees of proximity to each other. What appears 
 to be solid is never really so. Here as elsewhere he is on the 
 track of a great scientific truth. He seems to have been 
 attracted to this cosmical theory of a fortiiitous concourse of 
 atoms, by the facility with which it enabled him to eliminate 
 all creative principle, and all intellectual plan, from the world 
 and from life. Somehow these particles got at times, none can 
 know when or how, a slight deflection from the natural per- 
 pendicular downward movement, which would keep them in 
 everlasting parallel lines and make structure impossible. 
 Then somehow they are brought into contact and compose 
 bodies, which somehow hold together for a time and somehow 
 get dissolved in time into their original elements. And this 
 is going on through the whole universe. Happy accident 
 everywhere ; no order, no plan ; nothing that we can profit- 
 ably reduce to system outside the sphere of our own sensations 
 and the pleasure which they can afford. 
 
 Here is another wonderful flash of scientific insight ; the 
 same simple process repeating itself in all the worlds. The 
 unity of the universe in the principle of its structure and the 
 mode of its existence ! 
 
 Sensations, Epicurus explained, are produced by infinitely 
 small molecules which every body is continually giying off, 
 molecules that at first are images of the body which sheds 
 them. These molecules, floating abroad in space, strike on 
 the senses and produce perceptions of taste, colour, form, etc., 
 and are thus the cause of the pleasures which the senses 
 enjoy. But these organs of sense were generated by accident. 
 
22 LATEE GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 The eye was not made for seeing; an eye happened somehow 
 to come into existence, and was found useful for sight, and so 
 on with the rest. The mind is hut a finer sense, subject to 
 finer and more delicate influences and impressions, hut equally 
 getting its pleasure from the impact of those more suhtle 
 atoms which belong to what is called the intellectual sphere. 
 The virtue of this cosmical theory to Epicurus was the element 
 of chance which pervaded it ; the impossibility of constructing 
 out of it any system which might impose a law or bring 
 external authority to hear on man. He wanted to free man 
 utterly from any influence, cosmical or spiritual, which might 
 interfere with his quiet, serene regulation of his life. 
 
 In the same key entirely is his doctrine about the gods, 
 lie affirms the existence of the gods. He finds in himself and 
 in man the feehng that there are Behigs of a higher nature ; 
 accordingly there must be gods. But seeing that the idea of 
 gods and of divine intervention in human affairs was a source 
 of constant distraction and terror to man, he remits the gods 
 to abodes of serene contemplation and blessedness, where, 
 ' careless of mankind,' they know nothing of the turmoil of 
 creation and of government, where nature is beautiful and 
 bountiful, where storms and plagues never come, and where 
 content with their own tranquil enjoyments 
 
 ' they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl'd 
 Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl'd, 
 Uound their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world.' 
 
 Here again we have an instance of the wonderful worldly 
 wisdom of Epicurus in the construction of his system. He 
 could not get rid of the idea of the gods ; he set himself to 
 neutralise it, and to make it wholly inoperative on the practical 
 life of mankind. Quite in harmony with his doctrine that the 
 senses are the only trustworthy guides, is his notion that the 
 sun and the stars are about the size that they seem ; that the 
 sun is somehow lit every morning and extinguished every 
 
EPICUREAN INDIFFERENCE. 23 
 
 mght, and that the heavenly bodies, instead of being sources 
 of apprehension and terror, are powerless to help or to harm 
 mankind. His whole theory about the outward world is con- 
 structed to the moral scale, in such a way as to help man to 
 lead an untroubled and happy life. He bids htm take no 
 thought about the gods, about the creation, about the heavenly 
 bodies. They have absolutely nothing to do with man. Take 
 thought for the moment's pleasure, wisely, so as to leave the 
 least aftertaste of pain ; it is your all.^ 
 
 It is marvellous that a doctrine, which denied an order in the 
 creation and a moral element in man, should lay such great 
 hold upon the human heart. But there is nothing in classical 
 history which reveals so strong a bond of fellowship as that 
 which bound Epicurus and his disciples ; after the lapse of 
 generations Eusebius quotes the saying of Numeniiis, a Pytha- 
 gorean — ' The school of Epicurus resembles a true Common- 
 wealth ; free from civil war, exhibiting a single mind, a single 
 opinion.' ^ True to his central principle Epicurus despised 
 politics. Science was to him a harassing study. He had no 
 desire to meddle with anything which was not a sensible 
 object. Where was there any mathematical hne, point, or 
 circle, that he could touch ? Nowhere. Have nothing then 
 to do with these things, they belong to a world of distracting 
 dreams. So with politics. Why should a man who wants 
 only to be happy trouble himself with the needs, the schemes, 
 and the wrangling of knaves or fools. The Epicurean syste- 
 matically lived out of the world. Like the monk he wished to 
 forget it and to be forgotten by it. The Stoic had a far 
 nobler sense of a man's vocation, and Stoics, especially in 
 Eome, are found constantly in the forefront of pubhc life, 
 among the most active and notable men of their times ; but 
 
 1 See the passages collected in Ritter and Preller, Historia PhilosophioB 
 OraeccE et Romance, Gothas, 1878, §§ 365, flf. 
 
 2 Prcepar. Evang. , XIV. 5. 
 
24 LATER GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 the Epicurean cared only for himself and his company, and let 
 the great world go as it pleased. 
 
 The Sect did nothing for the world's elevation and advance- 
 ment, except produce Lucretius, its one great poet. Lucretius 
 was a passionate Epicurean, and the chief attraction for him of 
 the system lay in the deliverance it brought to men from 
 the distraction and torment inflicted by religion. The religion 
 which he strove to overthrow by his Epicurean philosophy 
 was a degrading superstition, that introduced all kinds of 
 mythological folly and falsehood into the processes of nature, 
 and all kinds of cruel, sensual, magical arts and tricks into 
 the conduct of life. Such a base and slavish superstition 
 his free soul utterly hated, and he hoped by the simple, 
 natural, universal cosmical system of Epicurus to destroy it. 
 Let it be remembered that Epicurus was the first entirely to 
 exclude mythological persons and forces from the government 
 of the natural world. 
 
 The system, as we have noticed, laid a very strong hold on 
 men in that stormy, selfish, and miserable time. There is 
 something in the mode of maintenance of that Epicurean 
 company in the Garden, which reminds one strangely of the 
 mode of life of another and far nobler company, who were 
 destined to regenerate the world. The most generous gifts 
 seemed to have passed freely among them ; they did not, as 
 far as we can see, esta.blish community of goods, but they 
 cared with large heart and free hand for Epicurus and for each 
 other. In the gifts which were freely sent, and the genial 
 acknowledgment of Epicurus, we see something which again 
 presents a far off likeness to the history and writings of St. 
 Paul. 
 
 What then was the charm of the Sect, and what the 
 secret of its power ? Cicero declares that not only Greece 
 and Italy, but the barbarian world around soon felt its 
 influence. Its followers endured persecution, and were often 
 
THE POWER OF EPICUREANISM. 25 
 
 associated in after generations with the Christians, as the mark 
 of scorn and hate. The doctrine was widely adopted at Eome. 
 Atticus, the friend of Cicero, was an Epicurean, and in Virgil 
 and Horace there is very clear evidence of its power. When 
 Christianity appeared it began to die away, but to the last its 
 disciples were enthusiastic in praise of its founder and his 
 work. The satirist Lucian, in the second century, speaks of 
 Epicurus as ' a man truly sacred and prophetic in nature, who 
 alone knew and taught the good and true, and was the 
 liberator of those who companied with him,' and in a passage 
 of unusual earnestness he writes of the blessings the book of 
 the Kvpiai So^ai or 'Articles' of the master brings to those who 
 come to it, ' what peace and tranc[uillity and freedom it works 
 within them, setting them free from terrors and spectres and 
 portents, from vain hopes and superfluous desires, putting 
 within them truth and understanding, and truly purifying 
 their souls, not by torch and squills, and such idle cere- 
 monials, but by right understanding, and truth and open- 
 mindedness.' '■ 
 
 Again, we may ask Wherein lay the secret of the power 
 of Epicureanism ? It was due in large measure to the fact 
 that of all the philosophies it offered the easiest and most 
 direct way of rest to man. It asked no intellectual effort ; 
 its philosophical system was summed up in a catechism which 
 could be easily learnt and remembered, and its end, pleasure, 
 was one which most men were only too ready to pursue. 
 There was terrible mind and heart weariness in the world of 
 the time; and amidst the shock of contending doctrines and 
 the clash of hostile armies the words of Epicurus sounded 
 like ' Come unto me and rest.' As the quiet cell of the monk 
 to the world-weary soldier of a later age, it had the charm 
 of peace and of freedom from care, and brought with it in- 
 difference to the distractions and miseries of the great world's 
 1 Lucian, Alexander, 47. 
 
26 LATER GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 affairs. Lactantius, a Christian writer of the 4th century, 
 accounts for its attraction thus : — 
 
 ' It tells the ignorant they need study no literature ; it releases the 
 niggardly from the duties of public beneficence ; it forbids the lounger 
 to serve the State, the sluggard to work, and the coward to fight. 
 The godless are told that the gods are indiiferent ; the selfish and 
 malevolent is ordered to give nothing to any one, — because the wise 
 man does everything for his own sake. The recluse hears the praises 
 of solitude ; and the miser learns that life can be supported on water 
 and polenta. The man who hates his wife is presented with a list of 
 the blessings of celibacy ; the parent of a worthless offspring hears how 
 good a thing is childlessness ; the children of impious parents are told 
 that there is no natural obligation upon them. The weak and luxurious 
 are reminded that paia is the worse of all evils ; and the brave man, 
 that the sage is happy even in tortures. Those who are ambitious are 
 bidden to court the sovereign ; and those who shrink from worry are 
 directed to avoid the palace.' ^ 
 
 There is truth no doubt in this picture ; just as many 
 foolish and base motives might be suggested with truth as 
 incentives to the monastic vocation in the Middle Ages. But 
 the really strong reason, depend upon it, was a deeper and 
 sounder one ; Epicureamsm was the readiest form in which, on 
 the basis of heathenism, men could see a promise — it was no 
 more — of rest to their souls. It reveals, on the other hand, 
 the dignity of man's nature, the grandeur of his moral endow- 
 ment, the utter inabHity of mere rest or pleasure to satisfy 
 his heart, to find that Epicureanism, with all its promises, 
 with all its attractions, with ail the passionate enthusiasm of 
 its devotees, has always had a brand upon it ; has always 
 been counted by the great world a base and hateful doctrine, 
 while 'Epicure' has gradually settled down as the designation 
 of the most contemptible of mankiud. 
 
 ^De Divin. Instit., III. 17. 
 
11. 
 
 EPICTETUS AND THE LAST EFEOET OF THE 
 HEATHEN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
II. 
 
 EPICTETUS AND THE LAST EFFORT OF THE 
 HEATHEN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 ' Epicueeak and Stoic are twin shoots ont of the same stem.' 
 They both, as we have seen, grew oiit of the new search for 
 happiness that had superseded the old search for truth, which 
 Socrates had pressed so keenly, and for which he had been 
 content to die. The question common to the two schools was, 
 How shall I secure the dignity, honour, and happiness of my 
 own life. The Epicurean answered it in one way, the Stoic 
 in another and a nobler way. Epicurus shut up his disciples 
 to what was on the whole a purely selfish form of phil- 
 osophical discipline, which recognised the senses as the sole 
 inlet of truth, and pleasure as the chief good. 'Avoid dis- 
 traction and perturbation,' he said in effect; ' cidtivate serenity 
 in kindly intercourse with friends, surround yourself as much 
 as possible with the objects which minister rational and satis- 
 fying pleasiire, and let the outer world go as it pleases.' 
 The Stoic looked at the matter in quite another light, and 
 his aims and methods we have now to consider. 
 
 The Cynic was the rudimental form of the Stoic. Epictetus 
 had constantly the word Cynic on his lips. The original 
 starting point of the two Sects was probably the indifference 
 of Socrates to outward things. At any rate, Cynic and Stoic 
 cultivated the most severe simplicity. In the case of a 
 Diogenes, this took the form of a boorish roughness and 
 
30 EPICTETUS. 
 
 ■coarseness, but Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school — the 
 Sect took its name from the Stoa or Porch where the teachers 
 ■conducted their instruction — shewed on every occasion, though 
 in less obtrusive forms, his contempt for externals. 
 
 The Cynic position, as laid down by Antisthenes, the 
 founder of the Sect, was a very simple one. Nothing is 
 really good but virtue, nothing is really bad but vice ; all 
 speculation which does not bear on morals is idle and 
 fantastic ; only in moral action is man free, for this is the 
 action of the one thing he can really call his own, the 
 mind. These precepts of the famous Cynic really give the 
 key to the Stoic thought and discipline. The doctrine of 
 virtue as the chief good finds place also in the Epicurean 
 system, for according to Epicurus virtue was the only 
 thing which was pure pleasure, with no flavour of bitter- 
 ness. But here was the essential difference. The virtue of 
 Epiciirus had not anything behind it ; the virtue of the 
 Stoic had. Epicurus beheved that there was nothing out- 
 side a man which had any title to rule or to influence. 
 He destroyed all fear of God, aU conception of an order 
 in nature, all idea of duty, except duty to self, in life. 
 Hence it follows that an Epicurean, who had once accepted 
 the creed 'pleasure is the cliief good,' had nothing except 
 a mere opinion that virtue was prudent, to keep him 
 from settling into the lees of a sensual life. The Stoic, 
 on the other hand, beheved in God, and in a grand order 
 in the world. The Stoic doctrine about God has a certain 
 obscurity which belongs to that inscrutable theme. At 
 bottom no doubt it was thoroughly Pantheistic. The 
 Stoics thought that there must be a power inherent in 
 the world to move it, as the soul moves the body ; and 
 pushed home they would confess that they themselves 
 were part of the All which this Supreme Spirit made 
 the vehicle of his energy, and that existing beings and 
 
THE STOIC IDEA OP GOD. 31 
 
 things represented only a passing stage in the grand 
 progress. From God all things proceed, and to him they 
 return; and everything that is, fulfils the universal Law. 
 But their language oftentimes seems to distinguish God as 
 a personal, intelligent and righteous Being, above all, 
 beyond all, his works, upholding and ruling them all. 
 
 This appears in the great hymn of Cleanthes to Zeus, 
 one of the noblest passages of the earlier Greek Stoicism, 
 which exhibits to us in their highest form a Stoic's 
 thoughts about God. 
 
 ' Thee it is lawful for all mortals to address. For we are thy off- 
 spring, and alone of all living creatures possess a voice which is the 
 image of reason. Therefore I will ever sing thee and celebrate thy 
 power. All this universe rolling round the earth obeys thee, and 
 follows willingly at thy command. Such a minister hast thou in thy 
 invincible hands, the two-edged, flaming, vivid thunderbolt. O King 
 most High, nothing is done without thee, neither in heaven nor on 
 earth, nor in the sea, except what the wicked do in their foolishness. 
 Thou makest order o\it of disorder, and what is worthless becomes 
 precious in thy sight ; for thou hast fitted together good and evil 
 into one, and hast established one law that exists for ever. . . . 
 Nay but, O Zeus, giver of all things, who dwellest in dark clouds and 
 rulest the thunder, deliver men from their foolishness. Scatter it 
 from their souls, and grant them to obtain wisdom, for by wisdom 
 thou dost rightly govern all things ; that being honoured we may 
 repay thee with honour, singing thy works without ceasing, as it is 
 right for us to do. For there is no greater thing than this, either 
 for mortal men or for the Gods, to sing rightly the universal Law.' 
 
 Here is something which is at the opposite pole to the 
 doctrine of Epicurus. A righteous power at work in the 
 universe was before the eye of the Stoic ; a fortuitous con- 
 course of atoms without reason or law was before the eye 
 of the Epicurean. The latter had nothing but himself to 
 look to or to be bound by; the former, the Stoic, had 
 what he called God. He saw one 'universal Law' per- 
 vading and ruling all things and all beings, and that Law, 
 if stern, was righteous, and enjoined virtue on man. To 
 
32 EPICTETDS. 
 
 live according to Nuturo was the Stoic formuk. The 
 Epicurean would equally have accej^ted it. But then his 
 Nature would have been tiie private piarticular nature of 
 the individual, with all its faults, flaws, :uul foihles, its 
 imperious passions and lusts. True, he would do his best, 
 according to the doctrine of his master, to give the liigher 
 part of his nature full scope in the conduct of his life. 
 But there would be nothing outside hira to help hini ; 
 nothing above him which could bring to bear any trutii 
 on his decisions or moral jjressure upon his conduct. To 
 live according to Nature would after all be to do what 
 was right in his own eyes, and it niigljt easily be a very 
 base j)art of his nature according to which at last he caine 
 to live. To the Stoic tiie word Nature had a niucli larger 
 and more authoritative meaning. He regarded himself as 
 under a haw that ruled equally men and States, and tides 
 and stars ; and the voice of that Law was always soundirjg 
 in his ears, Virtue is the only good, vice is the only evil, 
 for man. To him Virtue Ijad a sanction, a hold on his 
 conscience and his imagination, which in the case of the 
 rival system it utterly lacked ; and accordingly under the 
 Stoic doctrine and discipline we juight exjject on the whole 
 a very high standard of luoral action, and a high tone of 
 moral conduct in the life. 
 
 The history of StoicJKja justifies t)jc expectation. It 
 contributed altogether the noblest men and the lofticnt cofj- 
 duct that we njeet with in history, between the niartyrdom 
 of Socrates and the preacliing of St. Paul. For the Stoic 
 drew from his contemplation of this grand universal Law 
 thie conviction that there could Ijc no idlers in the creation. 
 To keep quiet ajid enjoy was the rnaxinj of K];icurus ; the 
 Stoic thought that njan was sent here to bestir himself and 
 live. Stoicism contributed its full share of manly njjright 
 and fearless e},ri.racters to the service of humanity. Not 
 
THE STOIC EXCLUSIVENESS. 33 
 
 that Stoicism was specially favourable to the development 
 of the patriotic passion. Its weakness was that its eye 
 was too constantly bent inwards. The motive of actions 
 was all that it cared about; and to external things it 
 professed itself indifferent. It regarded the multitude as 
 fools, and nursed uo small measure of intellectual and 
 spiritual pride. The Stoics formed an aristocracy of wisdom, 
 and a sm;ill one; and these features of the system did not 
 much encourage devotion to the puhHc welfare. Their 
 'apathy,' which they so successfully cultivated, was a defence 
 against evil surroundings, ai\d rather a hindrance than a 
 stimulus to political action, or efforts for reform. Indeed 
 in these days politics amounted simply to ' a battle of 
 kites and crows,' and reform was hopeless. In happier 
 times their idea of the manly life and of the claims of 
 duty might have made them energetic champions of the 
 cause of justice and of liberty : for in evil days they proved 
 themselves able to suffer for this cause with a courage and 
 dignity which have never been surpassed. But public hfe 
 was, on the whole, a distraction which they avoided ; and 
 charity, beneficent thought and work for others, they did 
 not cultivate. Their doctrine about the indifference of out- 
 ward things made them hai-d to the appeal of sorrow. 'Who 
 can telir they said, — 'these e^-ils from which this poor 
 wretch seems to be suffering, may be evils only in appearance: 
 or, if they ai-e real, he should exercise himself to endure.' 
 Thev had no conception of true benignity in the order of 
 nature. It was all good, they would say, very good, but 
 only to the philosopher, the man who lives according to 
 nature ; there is no hope for making things work for good 
 to weaklings and fools. So that all round it was a hard 
 doctrine, and a narrow one ; and like the doctrine of Epicurus, 
 it tended to shut man up withm himself; though it made 
 him within his narrow circle a much nobler and more useful 
 
 c 
 
34 EPICTETUS, 
 
 being. The effort of Stoicism was to make life a fortress, 
 well-armed and guarded; while Epicurus would have made 
 it a garden of delight. The Stoic prided himseK on being 
 the soldier of duty, and he had the martial manliness, 
 strength, and dignity in his bearing ; he is altogether a 
 more impressive and inspiring figure to look upon than 
 the man who was bent on making pleasure his god. 
 
 It is not in Greece that we can see the full form of 
 Stoicism, or estimate its influence on human thought and 
 life. It nursed within it a certain sternness and hardness ; 
 it magnified the moral above the intellectual element in 
 Philosophy ; it tended more and more as time went on to 
 regard Philosophy as the handmaid of practical conduct ; 
 and these were characteristics by no means specially attrac- 
 tive to the bright, acute and mobile Greek, though at the 
 same time the state of the world and the misery of life 
 were driving the later Greeks to the philosophers who 
 could best teach men to endure. There was great intellectual 
 discursiveness in the Greek Stoical School. Chrysippus, who 
 succeeded Cleanthes as the head of the Sect, is said to have 
 written more than any other philosopher ; and the Stoic 
 Metaphysics, Psychology, and Cosmology are full of curious 
 interest. They concern themselves with the vexed questions 
 of Philosophy which are in debate in all ages, and are as 
 unsettled still as when Thales first began his quest of philoso- 
 phical truth. The secret of things is still undiscovered. The 
 'eureka' of philosopher after philosopher has awakened alter- 
 nately the hope and the despair of mankind. But the actual 
 philosophizing, the endeavour to discover, is itself a necessary 
 intellectual discipline and is enlarging continually the realm 
 of truth. ' Man is not born,' says Goethe, ' to solve the 
 mystery of existence ; but he must nevertheless attempt it, 
 that ho may learn how to keep within the limits of the 
 
STOICISM AT BOME. 35 
 
 knowable'; and not only that, but that he may continually 
 enlarge the circle of his knowledge, and have clearer light 
 to guide him on his way. But there would be but little 
 profit in studying these speculations in brief, and it will be 
 best to pass them by, especially as it is through its moral 
 theory of life, and its moral influence on man and on society 
 that Stoicism is known to the work-a-day world. /\ 
 
 Manifold, however, as was the intellectual activity of the 
 Stoic School in Greece, and able and famous as were many 
 of its teachers, the Stoic type of man and form of life were 
 not Greek at heart, and it is not the Greek who rises before 
 the mind's eye when one talks of Stoicism, and searches 
 into the measure of its iufluence on mankind. In Greece 
 the Stoic was prophetic ; prophetic first of the coming Roman, 
 and then of that which was behind the Eoman, Christianity. 
 The Eoman type of character from the first was moulded 
 on the Stoic lines. The sternness, the strength, the indomi- 
 table endurance of the Eoman ; his indifference to intellectual 
 speculation or intellectual activity of any sort, his moral 
 dignity, his devotion to duty, and the simplicity of his tastes 
 and habits — which lent a strong tinge to the character of 
 even the degenerate Eomans of the Empire — seem to mark 
 out the Eoman as the typical Stoic ; and accordingly we find 
 that the most famous names and the most pregnant histories 
 in connection with the Stoic doctrine, belong to the Eoman 
 world. 
 
 It is a common observation that the Eomans conquered 
 the Greeks by the sword, while the vanquished overcame 
 their victors by their civilisation, of which Art, Literature, 
 and Philosophy, were the most prominent factors. Through 
 Eome, it is pointed out, Greek civilisation was handed on as 
 a legacy to the Christian world, while at the Renaissance, 
 Greek literature, reintroduced in its original and perfect 
 form, wrought an intellectual revolution in Europe, and 
 
36 EPICTETUS. 
 
 mightily prepared the way for the Eeformation. As early 
 as the days of Scipio Africanus Greek teachers began to 
 exercise a powerful influence in Eome, and the Stoic phil- 
 osophy attracted the Eonian mind at once. Panfetius of 
 Ehodes, the most eminent Stoic professor of his time, was 
 the friend and companion of Scipio, and did much to com- 
 mend Stoicism to the more thoughtful of the ruUng class 
 in the city. But it must he noted that in Eome Stoicism 
 somewhat modified its form and changed its dress. The 
 Eonian with his strong sense cared little for the integrity 
 of the system ; what he wanted was practical help for the 
 conduct of life, and Eonian Stoicism placed the moral part 
 of the system strongly in the foreground. Of Seneca, for 
 instance, it has been said, that he should be regarded rather 
 as a spiritual director than a systematic moralist; his writings 
 are not dogmatic treatises but moral sermons. Eoman 
 Stoicism was, in fact, the original doctrine largely tempered 
 by common sense. It was markedly eclectic in its method, 
 borrowing freely from every school all that seemed profit- 
 able for instruction and comfort. Seneca, its most copious 
 and popular expositor, frequently quotes with approval the 
 sayings of Epicurus. 
 
 This growing tendency of Eoman Stoicism to formulate 
 rules of life, and occupy itself with questions of practical 
 morals, transformed it more and more into a religion, and 
 it became the best religion with which, in the decay of the 
 old beliefs, and before the spread of Christianity, men could 
 fortify and comfort their hearts. So in the early days of 
 Imperial Eome the Stoic philosopher became the religious 
 instructor, the practical adviser, the sick-bed visitor, of the 
 disciples ; and something like a system of pastoral teaching 
 and influence became organised on the basis of the Stoical 
 philosophy among the upper ten thousand of the Eoman 
 world. How thoroughly religious the work of Philosophy 
 
THE ETHICS OP STOICISM. 37 
 
 was regarded by the best minds of Eome may be illustrated 
 by a quotation from Seneca's treatise ' On a happy life,' 
 which runs as follows : — 
 
 'Philosophy is the Art and Law of Life, and it teaolies us what to 
 do in all Cases. ... In Sickness it is as good as a Remedy to us ; for 
 whatsoever eases the Mind, is profitable also to the Body. The 
 Physician may prescribe Diet, and Exercise, and accommodate his Eule 
 and Medicine to the Disease ; but 'tis Philosophy that must bring us 
 to a contempt of Death, which is the Remedy of all Diseases. In 
 Poverty it gives us Riches, or such a state of Mind, as makes them 
 superfluous to us. It Arms us against all DiflBculties. . . . Philosophy 
 prompts us to relieve the Prisoner, the Infirm, the Necessitous, the 
 Condemn'd ; to shew the Ignorant their Errors, and rectifie their 
 Affections. It makes us Inspect and Govern our Manners ; it rouses 
 us where we are faint and drouzy ; it binds up what is loose, and 
 humbles in us that which is Contumacious : It delivers the Mind 
 from the Bondage of the Body ; and raises it up to the Contemplation 
 of its Divine Original.' ^ 
 
 It is in passages like this that Stoicism seems in a sense 
 prophetic of Christianity. 
 
 The maiu feature of the original Stoic doctrine in its 
 ethical branch was the firm assertion that the miud is the 
 man, and that what happens through the consent of the will 
 is that on which the welfare of the being absolutely depends. 
 The things which are independent of the decisions of the will, 
 which are ordered for a man by a power outside himself, — 
 call it God, or call it fate, — such as health, wealth, comfort, 
 reputation, and all the externals of life, the Stoic taught 
 himself to regard as absolutely indifferent. They made no 
 matter to the man ; through all their vicissitudes he remained 
 untouched and in full possession of the true treasures of his 
 being. How absolutely the Stoic aimed at ' apathy ' about 
 the accidents of life, and refused to be moved by them, 
 perhaps the following passage from Epictetus will shew 
 better than any lengthened description : — 
 
 ' A certain person's son is dead. Answer ; the thing is not within 
 1 Chapter iv., L'Estrange's translation. Loud. 1722, p. 119. 
 
38 EPICTETUS. 
 
 the power of the will ; it is not an evil. . . . Csesar has condemned a 
 person. It is a thing beyond the power of the will, not an evil. The 
 man is afflicted at this. Affliction is a thing that depends on the will ; 
 it is an evil. He has borne the condemnation bravely. That is a 
 thing within the power of the will ; it is a good. If we train ourselves 
 in this manner we shall make progress. . . . Your son is dead. What 
 has happened ? Your son is dead. Nothing more ? Nothing. Your 
 ship is lost. What has happened ? Your ship is lost. A man has 
 been led to prison. Wtat has happened ? He has been led to prison. 
 . . . But Zeus, you say, does not do right in these matters. Why ? 
 because he has made you capable of endurance ? because he has made 
 you magnanimous ? because he has taken from that which befalls you 
 the power of being evils 1 because it is in your power to be happy 
 while you are suffering what 3'ou suffer ; because he has opened the 
 door to you, when things do not please you ? Man, go out and do 
 not complain.' ^ 
 
 This was a very high doctrine indeed — ' it is a hard saying, 
 who can hear it,' the disciple of Epictetus might well exclaim, 
 aye, did exclaim — for the teaching had to be consideraTily 
 toned down to become a working theory of the conduct of 
 life for the Roman world. Epictetus, far more than any 
 Roman Stoic, returned to the ancient Cynic views. He was 
 a Stoic Puritan of the strictest type, and he lived in his life 
 what he taught with his lip ; every word with him was 
 sacredly real. This doctrine had to be somewhat modified 
 in actual practice. 
 
 The Roman School accordingly discovered that among 
 things which are not good or evil, there are differences of 
 an important kind. There ai-e some which meet a natural 
 want, or conduce to a higher good, or keep the body in 
 health, or leave the mind free for thought, and these things 
 they called ' things to be preferred,' while their contraries 
 were 'things to be avoided'; meanwhile the old term aSid(popa 
 (indifferent) which in the ancient doctrine of the school 
 included them all, was reserved for a much narrower class 
 of things of neutral tint and accidental value. This gave a 
 much larger human interest to the doctrine, and conciliated 
 
 1 Bk. III. eh. 8. 
 
SENECA AS STOIC. 39 
 
 many disciples of wealth and position, who might otherwise 
 have been driven away. Seneca was a man of large means 
 and high station ; a courtier and the intimate, we will not 
 say the parasite, of tyrants, and in his hands the Stoic 
 doctrine, though its high ideal was maintained, was made 
 more genial and benign than it appeared in the teaching of 
 either Zeno or Epictetus. The figure of Seneca is unquestion- 
 ably the most familiar, and in a sense the most important, 
 in the Eoman Stoic School ; and if we knew nothing of him 
 but his writings, we might well accept him as its greatest 
 master. But unfortunately we know too much about his life. 
 We may not select him as the Stoic hero of the decline, 
 because as a man he dishonoured the doctrines which he ex- 
 pounded and defended with so much eloquence and power ; 
 but we should be wrong to press on him too hardly, for his 
 lot was cast in evil times, and his part was a peculiarly 
 difficult one. He was rich, cultivated, and famous ; in the 
 foremost rank in the foremost city in the world ; the friend, 
 the tutor, the counsellor of the Imperial masters of the whole 
 realm of civilisation ; it was about as hard for him to live 
 out the Stoic doctrine, as, according to a higher Master than 
 Seneca, it is for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of 
 God. But still the writer of the apology for the murder of 
 Agrippina by Nero her son, must bear a weight of shame 
 which all his brilliant talent and his lofty ideas and ex- 
 positions cannot balance, and this forbids our taking him as 
 the typical Stoic in the last great struggle of the heathen 
 Philosophy to bear up against the growing degradation of 
 society. This downward tendency was never so dire as in 
 the age when help was hastening to man from the Eternal 
 King, whom Stoicism dimly discerned behind the veil of 
 visible and sensible existence, and who wears as the most 
 glorious legend on His Crown, ' Mighty to save.' A very 
 homely proverb tells us that it is always darkest before the 
 
40 EPICTETUS. 
 
 dawn. Never was heathenism morally so dark, so hopeless, 
 as when God was stretching ont His hand to bring to it 
 salvation. 
 
 The truly typical Stoic of the first age of the Empire 
 was Epictetus, a man almost as grand as Socrates in moral 
 proportion, as vigorous in moral stamina, though of course 
 unquestionably inferior in intellectual endowment. Epictetus 
 is a figure of unique grandeur in that dissolute and terrible 
 time. A slave of Epaphroditus, a freedman of Nero ; lame — 
 it is said that his master broke his leg in wanton frolic — 
 and weak and poor, he maintained through life at liome, 
 and afterwards, when he was banished by Domitian, at Nico- 
 polis, the noblest and most cheerful independence of circum- 
 stances, the most fearless and loyal devotion to truth, and 
 to the true welfare of all who resorted to him for instruction ; 
 and he produced a deeper impression on all who were brought 
 into contact with his teaching, than any philosopher but one 
 whom we meet with in secular history. Men sought his school 
 at Nicopolis from all quarters, and hung upon his words. 
 Like Socrates he wrote nothing. All that we know of him 
 is through his disciples. We learn what an impressive figure 
 he seemed to them, and one of them, Arrian, has preserved 
 and transmitted to us a tolerably full record of his discourses. 
 But, alas ! Arrian is not a Plato, and one cannot resist the 
 suspicion that Epictetus would have appeared to us in a 
 much braver form, if we had his own words, or if they had 
 been interpreted to us by a master of Philosophy. Still, the 
 record appears trustworthy as far as it goes, and we must be 
 thankful for what we have. A very strong and impressive 
 individuality looks out upon us through Arrian's discourses 
 of Epictetus, and there is a moral consistency throughout 
 which inspires confidence in the portraiture of the great 
 master which has thus been handed down. 
 
 The central principle of the Stoical system of Epictetus 
 
THE DIVINE FATHERHOOD. 41 
 
 was noble enough and true enough, if men could have cer- 
 tainly known its truth. But, amid the contradictions and 
 wranglings of rival sj'stems and philosophers, what men 
 longed to hear was some clear word of certainty which 
 might carry Heaven's own authority to their consciences and 
 hearts; some word which they would not have to judge but 
 which would judge them, command them, and set them 
 authoritatively about their work. Such a word — a word 
 which had power — was already in the world, and was 
 making its way towards the schools, when Epictetus stated 
 his doctrine. The essence of this doctrine, the supremacy 
 of reason and the kinship of man to God, may be dis- 
 cerned in the following passage : — 
 
 ' If a man should be able to assent to the doctrine as he ought, tliat 
 -we are all sprung from God in an especial manner, and that God is the 
 father both of men and of gods, I suppose that he would never have 
 any ignoble or mean thoughts about himself. But if Csesar should 
 adopt you, no one could endure your arrogance ; and if you know 
 that you are the son of Zeus, will you not be elated ? Yet we do not 
 so ; but since these two things are mingled in the generation of man, 
 body in common with the animals, and reason and intelligence in 
 common with the gods, many incline to this kinship which is miserable 
 and mortal ; and some few to that other which is divine and happy. 
 The few have no mean or ignoble tlioughts about themselves ; but with 
 the many, it is quite contrary. For they say. What am I ? a poor 
 miserable man, with my wretched bit of flesh. Wretched, indeed ; but 
 you possess something better than your bit of flesh. Why then do 
 you neglect that which is better, and why do you attach yourself to 
 the lower ? ' i 
 
 Well, this is a very noble principle. You have in you a 
 Divine part, born of God, do not play the beast or slave. 
 But how much does it mean, this doctrme that Zeus is our 
 father ? Mr. Capes, in his valuable manual on the Stoical 
 philosophy, speaks of Epictetus as having ' a sense of the 
 Fatherhood of God.'^ This can only be true in a very 
 partial measure, and the question what the divine Eather- 
 1 Bk. I. ch. 3. = Stoicism, Lond. 18S0, ch. 12. 
 
42 EPICTETOS. 
 
 hood meant to Epictetus is well worth investigating for a 
 moment, as it will reveal to us the fundamental distinction 
 between the heathen and Christian schools. Epictetus 
 formulated clearly enough the doctrine which was expressed 
 in the hymn of Cleanthes, that we are the offspring of God. 
 He saw plainly that there was that in- man which was 
 in the Divine image. So far he was at one with the 
 ^doctrine of Revelation. He might have read the word, 
 ' Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,' though 
 it is quite clear that he had not. But the knowledge of 
 the doctrine of the Fatherhood is quite different from the 
 sense of the Eatherliness of God. The Jews knew the name, 
 the Chinese knew the name, Epictetus had, as we have seen, 
 a very large and real knowledge of the name. But how 
 much did it mean ? That was what man needed sorely to 
 know ; and that was never known, that never could be fully 
 known, until One stood upon earth, inspired by such love 
 to man as moved Him to endure a life of sorrow and a 
 death of shame to manifest His love. One who said ' He 
 that hath seen me hath seen the Father.' ' Henceforth 
 ye both know him and have seen him.' It was no new 
 idea to man this indwelling of Deity. Euripides wrote the 
 words 
 
 /J ' ' ' ' - 1 
 
 aeo? yo-p Ti? ev rifj.iv. 
 
 ' Est Deus in nobis,' says Ovid.^ But what man needed 
 was not the doctrine but the fact of Fatherhood ; the Reve- 
 lation in God of a Father's mind, a Father's care, a Father's 
 love. The Stoic doctrine was an inspiration as far as it 
 went. In natures as profoundly pious and faithful as 
 
 ; that of Epictetus, it supplied, there can be no doubt, some- 
 thing very near to the comfort and strength which the 
 
 : Christian derives from the knowledge that God is Love. 
 
 ' Quoted by Schol. on Pind. Ke,m. vi. 7. ^ Fasti, vi. 5. 
 
RESTRICTED IDEA OF FATHERHOOD. 43 
 
 a knowledge revealed iii lines of living splendour in the 
 life and death of the Son of God. 
 
 It would be difficult to find in heathen literature any- 
 thing so much in the Christian key-note of joy in God as 
 this passage from Epictetus : — • 
 
 'For if we had understanding, ought we to do anything else both 
 jointly and severally than to sing hymns and bless the deity, and to 
 tell of his benefits ? Ought we not, when we are digging and ploughing 
 and eating, to sing this hymn to God ? " Great is God who has given 
 us such implements with which we shall cultivate the earth ; great 
 is God who has given us hands, the power of swallowing our food, im- 
 perceptible growth, and the power of breathing while we sleep." This 
 is what we ought to sing on every occasion, and to sing the greatest 
 and most divine hymn for giving us the faculty of comprehending 
 these things and using a proper way. . . . I am a rational creature, 
 and I ought to praise God ; this is my work : I do it, nor will I desert 
 this post so long as I am allowed to keep it ; and I exhort you to join 
 in this same song.'' 
 
 The noble old man had attained, we may think, to a 
 clearness of understanding or rather vision, which came 
 very near to the perfect knowledge revealed in the Gospel. 
 But this knowledge was in Epictetus himself, through the 
 clearness of his moral sight and his faithfulness to the in- 
 ward light given to him — ' the Light which lighteth every man 
 that Cometh into the world.' He had reached it through 
 a life-long discipline, such as only he in his times had 
 courage to endure, but there was nothing in his knowledge 
 that could become a heritage, a possession forever, to his 
 fellow men. We must try to grasp the wide distinction 
 between the knowledge that we are God's offspring which 
 may be gained by those who in prolonged and devout 
 meditation ' seek after God if haply they might feel after 
 him and find him,' and that sure, blessed, inspiring know- 
 ledge, not only of the truth of the Fatherhood, but of all 
 the pity, the tenderness, the help, the guidance, which the 
 
 iRk. I. ch. 16. 
 
44 EPICTETUS. 
 
 word Father promises to man, and which grows out of the 
 mystery of Eedemption — ' Hereby perceive we the love of 
 God, because he laid down his life for us.' It was the 
 certainty with which the Gospel spoke, testifying to actual 
 facts as matter of history, which laid such hold upon, and 
 brought such uplifting power to bear on, the world. 
 
 On the subject of man's immortality the words of 
 Epictetus are very vague and his knowledge obscure. His 
 doctrine about the Divine spark in man,- — ' a Divine Spirit 
 hath his seat within us,' writes Seneca — looks strongly in 
 the direction of immortality, and there are passages here 
 and there which seem to imply the hope of a personal 
 conscious existence beyond the tomb. Here is one : — ■ 
 
 ' Death ? Let it come when it chooses, either death of the whole or 
 of a part. Fly, you say. And whither ? Can any man eject me out 
 of the world ? He cannot. But wherever I go, there is the sun, there 
 is the moon, there are the stars, dreams, omens, and the conversations 
 with Gods.'^ 
 
 But here again is a passage in another and sadder key-note, 
 and this is as a rule the dominant : — 
 
 'And if you are not supplied with what is necessary, God gives the 
 signal for retreat, opens the door, and says to you, go. Go whither? 
 To nothing terrible, but to the place from whence you came, to your 
 > friends and kinsmen, to the elements ; what there was in you of fire, 
 goes to fire ; of earth, to earth ; of air, to air ; of water, to water ; 
 no Hades, iior Acheron, nor Cocytus, nor Pyriphlegethon, but all is 
 full of gods and spirits.'^ 
 
 There is nothing here of the inspiring certainty which 
 uplifted the heart even of wretched suffering slaves who 
 had heard the Gospel, and which enabled, not the philo- 
 sophers, but the poor, sick, ignorant, down-trodden pariahs 
 of society, to cry with a ring of triumphant certainty in 
 their words, ' death, where is thy sting ? grave, 
 where is thy victory ? The sting of death is sin ; and the 
 1 Bk. III. oh. 24. 2 Bk. ni. oh. 13. 
 
STOIC LIMITATIONS. 45 
 
 strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God 
 which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus 
 Christ.' 
 
 It was the Gospel which taught the workman and the 
 slave to hope, and in so doing re -made huinan society. 
 And here was the weakness of Stoicism, it had nothing 
 with which it could raise and hless the poor. It could 
 do something for a man of high intelligence and moral 
 energy, though to make him a brave sufferer was about ^ 
 its highest ministry, but it was helpless in face of the 
 great mass of mankind. It had some noble thoughts about 
 a man's duty to his fellows, but how to do this duty it found 
 not. It had nothing to take to them which they could 
 look upon as a gospel, no echo even of the angel-song 
 which heralded the Advent, — ' Fear not : for, behold, I 
 bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all 
 people. For unto you is born this day in the City of 
 David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.' It was 
 emphatically a doctrine of the upper classes, of the world 
 of culture. The rich, the noble, the learned were called, 
 not the poor. The creed tended to dryness and narrow- 
 ness, it shut a man up and centred him on self. It had 
 a necessary but fatal tendency to the doctrine of indiffer- 
 ence, according to which nothing is worth pursuing, nothing 
 is worth caring about ; a belief which impoverishes and in 
 the end contracts the soul. 
 
 Epictetus looked coldly on marriage, on the home, onv" 
 the service of the State. They were all distractions; they 
 multiplied a man's interests and anxieties; Philosophy con- 
 demned them. It narrowed a man's nature unspeakably, 
 this hardening process. Cutting off his relations, anxieties, 
 and cares, it cut off his noblest means of culture, and 
 stunted the full development of his life. Christianity 
 multiplies a man's relationships, anxieties, interests, and 
 
46 EPICTETUS. 
 
 concerns. Christ's first miracle was at a marriage feast. 
 Inclustrj', commerce, intercourse with and relation to distant 
 peoples, all the play and freedom of secular life, Christianity 
 quickened and consecrated, and it set men at work every- 
 where helping and blessing their fellow men. It too had 
 its doctrine about Care. Take no ' distracting ' thought 
 about food and raiment and the good of this life, for 
 your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all 
 these things. It is not Be careless about them ; they are 
 out of the sphere of your will, harden yourself to indiffer- 
 ence about ,them. No. The command is work, toil, give 
 scope to all your energies, multiply your interests and 
 aims, but remember — to free you from distracting thought 
 about them — that your heavenly Father is ruling, and that 
 vHe cares that you should be clothed and fed. First work- — 
 ' your best, your very best ; then trust, and be at peace. 
 This doctrine spread like flame. It keeps the heart warm 
 and glowing^ it expands the nature ; it multiplies the 
 joys that spring from the full exercise of the powers. 
 This Christian doctrine about Care has played a very large 
 part in the culture of Christendom, and is as full of 
 promise to poor sad souls borne down by their burden, 
 as the Stoic doctrine is depressing and deadening. 
 
 A second great flaw in the moral system of the Stoics 
 "^was its intolerable spiritual pride. The following is a 
 characteristic expression of this on the part of Epic- 
 tetus : — 
 
 ' For I wish to be surprised by disease or death when I am looking 
 after nothing else than my own will, that I may be free from pertur- 
 bation, that I may be free from hindrance, free from compulsion, and 
 in a, state of liberty. I wish to be found practising these things that 
 I may be able to say to God, Have I in any respect transgressed thy 
 command ? have I in any respect wrongly used the powers which thou 
 gavest me ? have I misused my percejjtions or my preconceptions ? 
 have I ever blamed thee ? have I ever found fault with thy adminis- 
 tration ? I have been sick, because it was thy will, and so have 
 
THE NOTE OP DESPAIR. 47 
 
 others, but I was content to be sick. I have been poor because it was 
 thy ^\^ll, but I was content also.' ^ 
 
 That could be in no true sense a gospel which presented 
 a man in such an attitude before God and his fellow men. 
 It was the Gospel whose Litany is, ' God be merciful to 
 me a sinner,' which touched man's heart at the depths, and 
 touches it to this day, wherever it is preached throughout 
 the human world. 
 
 In conclusion, perhaps the most impressive thing in the 
 discourses of Epictetus, and in the heathen Philosophy of 
 that time, is the note of something like despair which runs i/ 
 through it ; not personal despair, but despair of its power 
 to do anything for the world. There is one passage in 
 Epictetus which seems like the last wail of the dying 
 Philosophy, and which may fittingly close this chapter. 
 ' Show me a Stoic,' Epictetus cries : — 
 
 ' Show me a Stoic if you can. Where or how ? But you can show 
 me an endless number who utter small argviments of the Stoics. For 
 do the same persons repeat the Epicurean opinions any worse 1 And 
 the Peripatetic, do they not handle them also with equal accuracy ? 
 Who then is a Stoic ? As we call a statue Pliidiac which is fashioned 
 according to the art of Phidias ; so show me a man who is fashioned 
 according to the doctrines which he utters. Show_me^ a_man_who is 
 sick and happy, in danger and happy, dying and happy, in exile and 
 happy, in disgrace and happy. Show him : I desire, by the gods, to 
 see a Stoic. You cannot show me one fashioned so ; but show me 
 one at least who is forming, who has shown a tendency to be a Stoic. 
 Do me this favour ; do not grudge an old man seeing a sight which 
 I have not seen yet. . . . Let any of you show me a human soul 
 ready to think as God does, and not to blame either God or man, 
 ready not to be disappointed about anything, not to consider himself 
 damaged by anything, not to be angry, not to be envious, not to be 
 jealous ; and why should I not say it direct ? desirous, from a man to 
 become a god, and in this poor mortal body thinking of his fellowship 
 with Zeus. Show me the man. But you cannot.' ^ 
 
 And the answer to the despairing cry of the grand old 
 iBk. III. ch. 5. 'Ek. II. eh. 19. 
 
48 EPICTETDS. 
 
 heathen teacher comes from the lips of the infant 
 Church : — 
 
 'Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through 
 our Lord Jesus Christ ; by whom also we have access by faith into this 
 grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And 
 not only so, but we glory in tribulations also : knowing that tribiilation 
 worketh patience ; and patience experience ; and experience hope : and 
 hope maketh not ashamed ; because the love of God is shed abroad 
 in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, which is given unto us.' 
 
III. 
 
 MARCUS AUEELIUS, AND THE APPROXIMATION OF 
 THE HEATHEN TO THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 
 
III. 
 
 MARCUS AURELIUS, AND THE APPROXIMATION OF 
 THE HEATHEN TO THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 
 
 The most significant feature in the development of the 
 heathen philosophy, as the times drew near the Advent, 
 was its endeavour to supply just the same kind of teaching 
 and influence which Christianity came to offer to the world. 
 Seneca was not so much a philosopher as a preacher of 
 moral sermons ; and Philosophy in the Roman era con- 
 stantly tended to discourse of a moralising kind, imparting 
 wise counsel to the individual man about the varied duties, 
 trials and experiences of life. Its main theme came to be 
 the ragulation of life with wisdom and dignity, so as to 
 secure some fau' measure of happiness, and of security 
 against distraction and distress. 
 
 The Greek philosophers whom the leading Roman families 
 attached to their households in the days of the decline of 
 the RepubUc and the rise of the Empire, filled something 
 like the place occupied by the domestic chaplain of the 
 ""rreat English houses in the last century. Of the almost 
 menial position and treatment which feU to the lot of these 
 chaplains Lord Macaulay gives a graphic picture in his 
 History; this is quite capped, however, by Lucian's descrip- 
 tion of the treatment of. the domestic philosopher in Rome. 
 The Roman noble as a rule kept his philosopher for show, 
 and to give a gloss of culture to his Hfe. Lucian, in one 
 
52 MARCUS AURELItrS. 
 
 of his bitter satires, pictures him at table, obliged, like the 
 chaplain, to put up with the crumbs of the feast. 'If at 
 any time a pig be cut up, or a venison pasty, you had 
 need have the carver your friend, or you will divide with 
 Prometheus, and nothing but the bones will come to your 
 share.' But probably the chaplain and the philosopher got on 
 the whole as much respect as they deserved. In Eome there 
 was no lack of adventurers who donned the philosopher's 
 cloak, and learnt the mere jargon of the schools, to make a 
 living by attaching themselves to the household of some 
 rich patron ; and on such no sympathy need be wasted. 
 Dion Cassius makes Augustus warn Meecenas against such 
 in the significant words, ' Under the cloak of that profession 
 many knaves bring infinite misfortune on the State as well 
 as on their dupes.' Lucian speaks out more roundly. He 
 charges the professional moralists with being ' greedy of 
 lucre, more passionate than dogs, more cowardly than hares, 
 more lascivious than asses, more thievish than cats, more 
 quarrelsome than cocks.' But there were instances of a 
 very different kind, as, for example, when the younger Cato 
 travelled to Pergamos to persuade the Stoic Athenodorus 
 to enter his household, and entertained him till his death. 
 
 More important however than the treatment of these 
 teachers is the place they occupied in the social system, and 
 the function they were expected to fufil. They came to be 
 in Piome a kind of clerical order ; limited in number, and 
 moving entirely among the upper ten thousand ; but ex- 
 pected to say a phrase in season on the important domestic 
 occasions, and above all to have words of consolation for the 
 dying. There is an amusing tale of one Favorinus who was 
 discoursing to his class, when he heard that the wife of 
 one of his former pupils, a man of wealth and station, had 
 been delivered of a sou. He proposed that they should go 
 to congratulate hgr. So off they went. Introduced to the 
 
DOMESTIC PHILOSOPHERS. 53 
 
 lady's mother the professor inquired after her health. Then 
 he expressed a hope that she suckled her child ; and when 
 the mother answered that she was not strong enough, he 
 preached her a little sermon, nay, it was a long one, on 
 the duty of the mother to her offspring, and denounced 
 roundly the new artificial habits. So we see the kind of 
 change which had come over the spirit of Philosophy, and 
 the ideas and habits of the philosopher. ' If a man is well 
 to do,' says Dion Chrysostom, ' he is too happy to give Phil- 
 osophy a thought. But let him lose his fortune or his 
 health, he will be the more ready to listen then ; let his 
 wife or his son or his brother die, then he wiU send for 
 the sage to comfort him, and to teach him how to bear so 
 much misfortune.' Especially was he expected at the couch 
 of the dying. In those death scenes of some of the noblest 
 men and women of Eome sacrificed to the jealousies and 
 antipathies of the Imperial tyrants, which Tacitus paints 
 with such graphic power, the figure of the philosopher, com- 
 forting and sustaining the martyr in his last hours, is rarely 
 absent ; and so common was it that Stoics should frequent 
 the houses of sorrow and the chambers of death, that a 
 rich upstart is pictured by Petronius as directing his servants 
 that ■■ when his time draws near no ghostly counsels are to 
 vex his peace of mind, and no philosopher is to be admitted 
 to his bed of death.' 
 
 Very interesting too are the accounts which have come 
 down to us of the schools of the philosophers, which carried 
 on the culture of society during the generations in which 
 Christianity was winning its way to supremacy. Pericles 
 tells the Athenians in his celebrated funeral oration, that 
 Athens was a sort of school of Greece. His words were pro- 
 phetic ; Athens remained the head quarters of philosophical 
 culture, the chief University city of the Empire, for many 
 hundred years. The philosophical schools continued to 
 
54 MAECUS AUEELIXJS. 
 
 furnish instruction under a series of teachers, who seem to 
 have followed each other with wonderful regularity, and with 
 an entire absence of contention — the aged head of the school 
 mostly designating his successor, who would take his place in 
 the chair by universal consent, in a spirit of devotion to a 
 sacred duty' not always apparent in the Episcopal successions 
 of the Christian Church. The attendance of students wa;s 
 large ; more like that at the mediaeval universities. Where 
 the students were reckoned by tens of thousands, than the 
 Universities of our more modern days. "We hear of one 
 Theophrastus who had 2000 students. And they seem to 
 have been very like the students of these present times-. 
 The student type is evidently a very persistent one. Town 
 and gown riots were common, practical jokes on the fresh- 
 men were not unknown. The various nations had their 
 clubs, and banquets were kept up with great zeal in honour 
 of the founders of the schools. Serious conflicts seem to 
 have been carried on by the students of rival professors, 
 that is the professors of rival schools, for within the school 
 there was no rivalry. Libanius, a celebrated teacher of the 
 4th century, taunts his pupils that they were not like 
 others whom he had seen, who had wounds on the head and 
 face and hands, sure evidence of the love they bore their 
 tutors, as great as their love for their parents. ' But you,' 
 he adds, disdainfully, ' what service of this sort on my behalf 
 can any of you point to ? what risk or blow encountered, or 
 what bold word or look ? Nay far from that you run away 
 to other teachers, taking your fees with you ; and so rob one 
 professor while you pay court to another.' 
 
 It would be easy to retail pleasant gossip about the 
 
 school of Athens,-^ but the subject has a graver interest for 
 
 our present purpose. There was a very lofty tone of moral 
 
 discipline in the schools, that had something of the elevation 
 
 1 See Capes, University Life in Ancient Athens, Lond. 1877. 
 
UNIVERSITY LIFE AT ATHENS. 5S 
 
 of the teaching of the great masters, which we have noted 
 so conspicuously in Epictetus. Philosophy was aiming at 
 a moral regeneration of society ; it saw dimly enough that 
 that was the one thing needful. Its society was a very 
 limited clique in the great world ; and its salvation was at 
 root but a pedant's dream. And yet it occupied a very 
 definite and important place in the great scheme of human 
 development. It awakened a keen desire which it could 
 not satisfy, and like the friars of St. Francis at a later age, 
 it created a thirst for a living gospel. It was not at heart 
 antagonistic to Christianity; it cleared and laid bare the field 
 for the sower of the living germs of the truth. Clemens 
 Alexandrinus says that God had three covenants with men, 
 the covenant of the Law, the covenant of Philosophy, and 
 the covenant of the Gospel. And there is deep truth in 
 this ; inasmuch as God's ordinance for the heathen world that 
 it should ' seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after 
 him and find him,' was as essential though not so visible 
 a step in His education of the world, as the giving of the 
 Law. The Law in one way, Philosophy in another, laid 
 bare the great want of humanity, a power from heaven to 
 heal, to quicken, and to save. 'What the Law could not 
 do, in that it was weak through the flesh,' God accomplished 
 by the Gospel. And so with equal truth we may say that 
 what the wisdom of the wise could not do, in that it was 
 weak through its inability to lay hold on the will in man, 
 the Gospel accomplished, and redeemed them who were 
 ' under Philosophy,' sighing for the redemption, as well as 
 them who were ' under the Law,' watching and waiting for 
 the salvation of Israel. Philosophy led the world up to 
 the point where it could lead it no longer, and with mute 
 voice invoked the help of a higher hand. 
 
 Aulus Gellius paints a very striking portrait of Taurus, a 
 philosopher at Athens in the 2nd century, about the time 
 
56 MARCUS AUEELIDS. 
 
 of Marcus Aurelius, who seems to have devoted much thought 
 and care to this pastoral oversight of the lads committed to 
 his charge. 
 
 He was ' not content with formal lectures, but did liis best to form 
 the character of his young friends by personal converse ; chatting with 
 them at his bedroom door when they had walked home ^th him from 
 lecture, travelling with them sometimes in the country, taking long 
 walks to see them when he heard that they were sick, and whiUng 
 away their weariness with pleasant talk, in which the serious mingled 
 with the gay. If he asked his pupils to his table, he did not care to 
 tempt the appetite with costly viands ; but the simple fare of pudding 
 or of salad was seasoned with Attic salt, and his guests were happier 
 and wiser when they left him. He had a way of delicately hinting 
 that a fault might be mended or a bad habit dropped, which served 
 its end while it spared his hearer's self-respect. Yet Taurus was no 
 easy-going teacher with a standard easily attained. He Hked to tell 
 his faithful friends the story of Euclides who braved death to hear 
 Socrates, his friend and guide, when it was penal for one of Megara to 
 enter Athens ; whereas now-a-days, he said, philosophers must often 
 wait till their pupils have recovered from the wine-party of the night 
 before. 
 
 'He reproached them also for their want of earnestness and depth ; 
 told them that they wanted to pick and choose, to gather here a thought 
 and there a hint,' somewhat as lecturers now-a-days complain that 
 undergraduates are too practically minded, and read not for the sake 
 of knowledge but a class.'^ 
 
 This glance at the spirit of the philosophical teachers in 
 the early generations of the Christian era, is a fit introduction 
 to the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, in which we can trace 
 ■' very clearly indeed the approximation of the heathen to the 
 Christian Schools. Marcus Aurelius is the conspicuous ex^ 
 ample of the tendency to those modes of thinking, feeling, 
 and li^-ing, which hrought heathenism as near as in its own 
 strength and wisdom it could come to Christianity. For 
 however strong may be our desire to do full justice to the 
 heathen striT,-ing, however keen our admiration for the essen- 
 tial nobleness of many a heathen life of that time, however 
 firm our conviction that this Stoical philosophy, with its lofty 
 ' University Life in Ancient Athens, p. 48 f. 
 
CHRISTIAN TENDENCIES IN AURELIDS. 57 
 
 moral aim was not without Divine guidance, we cannot hide 
 from ourselves the conclusion that there was nothing widely 
 quickening in it ; it was really, though in a high sense, 
 pedantic ; it needed culture to understand and practise it ; 
 and after all it was but a limited human gospel. There was 
 the human boundary line about it everywhere, and not only 
 that, but the scholar's boundary line, which left necessarily 
 the great mass of the toiling, suffering poor quite outside its 
 pale. Not that this was intentional. Seneca has some very 
 noble thoughts about our duty to the ignorant and wretched ; 
 Epictetus speaks in a still more robust and generous tone ; 
 Marcus Aurelius, as we shall see, has almost Christian thought 
 for the gTeat mass of the poor. The philosophers did their 
 utmost, though they never felt, never with their views could 
 feel, that passion for the poor which fired the heart of a 
 Cliristiau apostle. The essential weakness, in the long run 
 and on a large scale, of the philosophers' salvation of society, 
 is that it works from the height downwards and never reaches 
 far ; the Christian regeneration works from the depth upwards, 
 and permeates society. 
 
 This is the fatal incapacity of the wisdom of the wise to 
 work a reformation ; it has no hold on the hearts of men. 
 The philosophers who tried the last grand experiment in 
 the days of the Ceesars made clear the truth for all time ; 
 our philosophers in these days are repeating their attempt, 
 and will meet with the same failure. 
 
 Marcus Aurelius was the Stoic thinker in whom this more 
 benign and rninistrant aspect of Philosophy was most con- 
 spicuous, and this makes him the link of connection between 
 the heathen and the Christian schools. The Greek in the 
 days of Pericles had been very well content with his life : it 
 was full of free and joyful activity. The masterpieces of art 
 were continually under his eye ; the masterpieces of literature 
 were continually in his ear ; the conduct of an empire, which 
 
58 MARCOS AUEELIUS. 
 
 was making the brightest page written till then in the world's 
 history, occupied his understanding ; and. all the cheerful 
 surroundings of Athens gladdened his life. The Eoman of 
 the age of Nero and Domitian was not content with his 
 life. The world had known some ages of miserable strife 
 and sorrow since the bright daj's of Pericles ; and it had 
 woke up to the conviction that on the whole it was a sad 
 world, a prey to grievous and continually increasing ills. 
 Man began to find his own body with its lusts and passions a 
 burden and a curse to him — Persius, the Stoic satirist, has 
 the phrase ' accursed flesh.' The world under the terrible 
 tyranny of the earlier Ccesars had learnt to tremble at its 
 future ; everywhere in the individual man and in society at 
 large there was the growing feeling that the world was in evil 
 case. It was redemption, restoration from ruin, life from 
 death, which Christianity brought to it. But no one can read 
 much in the literature of those times without hearing a kind of 
 wailing cry running through all its deeper passages. And 
 Philosophy modified its tone in response. There was a 
 growing recognition in its teachings that man was a being 
 
 o o o o o 
 
 who needed to be helped, strengthened, and comforted ; that 
 he was not sufficient to himself, and that his life was not 
 sufficient to satisfy him ; that somehow and from some source 
 help must be brought to him, in what was becoming his sore 
 and bitter need. When Seneca in djdng begged his physician 
 to bring him a draught of the poison which he had long kept 
 by him in store, it reveals the depth of the distress and need ; 
 > and accordingly in Seneca and Epictetus we recognise a kind 
 of yearning compassion for the sorrows and the sins of men,- 
 quite foreign to the spirit of the earlier Schools. Seneca ate 
 with his slaves, and did his best to lighten their lot, but they 
 were slaves still, and his Stoic phrases must have sounded 
 somewhat hollow in their ears. Epictetus recognised earnestly 
 the sin and the misery around him, and there are some 
 
CHARACTER OF THE AGE. 59 
 
 tender passages of compassion in his writings ; but his 
 doctrine that the wise man should find nothing painful in 
 inevitable calamity, took the strength out of his efforts at 
 ministry. His only cure for the sin was Philosophy, and for 
 the sorrow a discipline which would make men indifferent to 
 its pangs. ' The heart of man must something love.' For 
 want of something to love in that invisible sphere into which 
 he was straining his sight, the life of man was growing sad 
 and poor. It was the love of God which would save it. 
 
 Marcus Aurelius seems to have been nearer to this truth 
 than any other heathen thinker, and he carried up to the 
 highest point that, yearning and aspiration of heathendom 
 which was met and satisfied by the Gospel. He was by no 
 means so deep or so strong a thinker as Epictetus. But two 
 very eventful generations had passed since that most robust 
 and vehement of philosophers had longed passionately, but in 
 vain, to see a true Stoic at Nicopolis. The world on the 
 whole had got sadder and more in need of help ; and the 
 hearts of great thinkers had got more pitiful, more disposed to 
 bring a helpful, healing hand to bear, if possible, on the 
 maladies and miseries of society. The Empire too had been in 
 existence for near two centuries. The pax Eomana, though 
 a very clumsy and brutal parody of the peace of which the 
 fond hearts of prophets and poets had dreamed, had at any rate 
 given men some rest from ceaseless and wasteful wars. And 
 not only that, it had brought distant peoples into intimate 
 relations, and had developed those domestic interests and 
 associations between men, families, and communities, such as 
 a long peace only can generate. Men were searching into 
 their relations with each other, their duties to each other, with 
 the idea to inspire them, that brotherhood and not enmity was 
 the normal relation of mankind. And a state of thought and 
 feeling was created which inevitably found utterance by the 
 lips of the philosophers, and brought to the front those 
 
60 MARCUS AURELIUS. 
 
 questions, those conditions and needs of society, which 
 Christianity discerned to be fundamental. 
 
 Marcus Aurelius, although as a thinker he lacked the force 
 of Epictetus, had some graces of disposition and charms of char- 
 acter which the robuster natures miss. He was one of the 
 purest, gentlest, and most conscientious of men ; a perfect 
 martyr to duty, a constant censor of himself, and minister 
 to all around. If he was not born in the purple, he was 
 carefully educated for the throne. Early adopted by the 
 Emperor Antoninus Pius as heir to the Empire, he was 
 trained with the most vigilant care for his high duties, under 
 the eye of the Emperor, a wise and upright ruler, and under 
 the hand of the ablest men in Eome. lu truth, perhaps he 
 was a little overtrained. \ As seems to have been the case 
 with Mr. John Stuart Mill, his nature was somewhat narrowed 
 and cramped by the excessive culture of his intellect, and the 
 consciousness of the vast importance of his dispositions and 
 actions, which was kept constantly before his sight.. It is 
 possible to have too much even of conscientiousness. It may 
 be so morbidly active as to destroy the healthy balance and 
 the free play of the powers. Some of Dr. Arnold's 6th form 
 boys went up from Eugby to the Universities staggering 
 beneath a weight of conscious conscientiousness which was a 
 little too heavy for them, and anticipated too soon the weightier 
 burdens of life. So with Marcus Aurelius, there is an almost 
 painful sense of anxiety about the discharge of his duties, 
 which somewhat interfered with the freedom and fulness of his 
 life. Perhaps Fortune shewed a touch of her irony in calling 
 him to a throne. His heart was in the schools. His delight 
 was meditation ; but as Emperor Fate called him to a life of 
 constant and most critical action ; in which, even in the camp, 
 he played his part with singular wisdom and dignity ; though 
 there was always a little too much self-consciousness, a little too 
 much thought how this and that would become a philosopher. 
 
HIS EDUCATION. 61 
 
 His teachers were numerous and able, and his gratitude to 
 them was warm and profound. But there were too many of 
 them, and they helped to overweight his life. ' From my grand- 
 father Verus,' he says, ' I learned good morals and the govern- 
 ment of my temper. From the reputation and remembrance 
 of my father, modesty and a manly character. From my 
 mother piety and beneficence, and abstinence not only from 
 evil deeds but from evil thoughts, and, further, simplicity in * 
 my way of living, far removed from the habits of the rich.' 
 Then he goes on to give a long list of his instructors and a 
 very methodical, a too methodical, account of what he learned 
 from each. There was his great grandfather ; there was his 
 governor from whom among other things he learned 'endur- 
 ance of labour, and to want little, and to work with my own 
 hands, and not to meddle with other people's affairs, and not 
 to be ready to listen to slander.'^ Then follow Diognetus, 
 Bacchius, Tandasis, and Marcianus, who were his chief in- 
 structors in Philosophy. Then from Eusticus he learned that 
 his character required improvement and discipline, and many 
 other things, among them, happily, to abstain from fine 
 writing ; and he made him acquainted with the writings or 
 rather Memorials of Epictetus. Then follows Apollonius who 
 taught him freedom of will and undeviating steadiness of 
 purpose, and to look to nothing else, not even for a moment, 
 except to reason ; Sextus taught him a benevolent disposition ; 
 Alexander the grammarian to abstain from fault finding. From 
 Fronto he learnt that those who are called Patricians are 
 rather deficient in paternal affection — much as amongst us 
 those who are called Christians are often sadly deficient in 
 Christianity ; then follow Alexander the Platonist, and Catulus, 
 and his brother Severus, with Thrasea, Helvidius, Cato, Dion, 
 and Brutus, from whose lives and recorded words he learned ' the 
 idea of a polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity 
 
 J Meditations, I. 1—5. 
 
62 MARCOS AUKELIUS. 
 
 administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of 
 speech, and the idea of a kingly government which respects 
 most of all the freedom of the governed.' Then Maximus, and 
 last of all his father by adoption, Antoninus Pius, the Master 
 of the Eoman world.-'- 
 
 This long list of names explains much in Marcus Aurelius. 
 A man who could thus map out his intellectual and moral 
 • career and trace each feature to its parent, redistributing 
 among the crowd of teachers the gifts which they had 
 bestowed, must have had in him an almost lagrbi d ha bit of^ 
 constant introgoection which would interfere in no small 
 measure with the natural unfolding of the character. It 
 gave him a certain scholastic not to say pedantic habit of 
 thought and action, which makes one think that he would 
 have been a larger, stronger man, and more helpful to his 
 times, if he had studied and moralised a little less, and lived 
 a little more. But be this as it may, we have in the thoughts 
 of Marcus Aurelius the revelation of a mind singularly honest 
 and capable ; largely cultivated ; tender and pitiful, pious and 
 devoted to duty. In many ways he reminds us rather of 
 some great mediaeval saint than any man of classical antiquity 
 whose words have come down to us ; though through the 
 poverty and uncertainty of his beliefs, and the negative 
 character of his Stoic discipline, we miss utterly the force 
 and the fire with which a Benedict or a Bernard acted on the 
 world. But in spite of this limitation he seems to carry to a 
 higher point and nearer to the Christian faith the great religious 
 ideas which we have already drawn from the works of Epictetus, 
 and which formed the basis of the teaching of Seneca and the 
 Eoman Stoic School. 
 
 In the first place, as to his belief in God, which is the 
 fundamental belief of the soul. There is a yet higher strain 
 in these words of Marcus Aurelius than in those of Epictetus: 
 
 ' Meditations, I. 5 — 14. 
 
OPTIMISM OF AUEELIUS. 63 
 
 ' To go from among men, if there are gods, is not a thing to be afraid 
 of, for the gods will not involve thee in evil ; but if indeed they do not 
 exist, or if they have no concern about human affairs, what is it to me to 
 live in a universe devoid of gods or devoid of Providence. But indeed 
 they do exist, and do care for human things ; and they have put all the 
 things in man's power to enable him not to fall into real evils.' ^ 
 
 Again : — 
 
 ■' Love the art, poor as it may be, which thou hast learned, and be con- 
 tent with it ; and pass through the rest of life like one who has intrusted 
 to the gods with his whole .soul all that he has, making thj-self neither 
 the tyrant nor the slave of any man.' ^ 
 
 Still higher is the following : — 
 
 ' Live with the gods. And he does live with the gods who constantly 
 shews to them that his own soul is satisfied with that which is assigned to 
 him, and that it does all that the demon wishes which Zeus hath given to 
 every man for his guardian and guide, a portion of himself.' ^ 
 
 And this perhaps crowns the whole : — 
 
 ' To those who ask where hast thou seen the gods or how dost thou 
 comprehend that they exist, and so worshippest them, I answer in the 
 first place that they may be seen even with the eyes ; in the second place 
 neither have I seen my own soul, and yet I honour it. Thus then with 
 respect to the gods, from what I constantly experience of their power, 
 from this I comprehend that they exist and I venerate them.' ■* 
 
 In these passages there is something which in the attitude 
 of the soul, in the belief, in the aspiration, is a clear approxi- 
 mation to the Christian piety, which was kindled and nourished 
 by what it knew of God. 
 
 The next point in which there is an approach to the 
 Christian view is the deep conviction which he cherishes 
 of the goodness of the order of the world. Take these words 
 of Epictetus : — ' But what says Zeus ? Epictetus, if it were 
 possible I would have made your little body and your little pro- 
 perty free and not exposed to hinderance. . . . But since I am 
 not able to do for you what I have mentioned, I have given 
 you a small portion of "us."'^ This is the underlying 
 
 1 Meditations, II. 11. ^ Ihid., IV. 31. ' Ibid., V. 27. 
 
 «/4jU, Xn. 29. i'Bk. Loh. 1. 
 
64 MARCUS AURELICS. 
 
 thought of the philosophy of Epictetus. Always there is 
 the haunting shadow — a necessity of things which limits the 
 divine beneficence, and makes this a world in which man must 
 always be on his defence against hostile powers. He breaks 
 out into the most noble and beautiful utterances, not of con- 
 tentment only but of joy in God, and in all the mercies with 
 which He had crowned his life. But, always, as has been said, 
 there is the haunting shadow: the presence of something around 
 us in life which is evil and hostile, and from which Philosophy 
 is our only shield. 
 
 Well, there is the same haunting shadow at times in the 
 thoughts of ^larcus Aurelius, at times there are utterances 
 of almost despair, and even references to the ' open door ' of 
 suicide. But on the whole Aurelius has the calmest confidence 
 in the goodness of the order of the world. So good indeed he 
 is sure it is, so entirely under the hand of a benignant Deity, 
 >. that he is confident that all the woes and wrongs of life, and 
 even death itself, cannot be e'^'ils, since God allows them to 
 exist within the sphere of His benign and righteous reign. 
 
 ' iCotliiiig i:- evil that i= according to nature.' ' 
 
 'If the gofls have detenniued about me and about the things which 
 must happen to me, thev have determined well ; for it is not ea.=y even to 
 imagine a Deity without forethonaht ; and as for doLQg me harm, why 
 should they have any desire towards that ? for what advantage would 
 residt from this to them or to the whole, which is the special object of 
 their providence ? But if they have not determined about me individu- 
 ally, they have certainly determined about the whole at least, and the 
 things which happen, by way of sequence in this general arrangement, I 
 ought to accept with pleasure and be content vrith them. . . . But if how- 
 ever the gods determine about none of the things which concern us, I am 
 able to determine about myself, and I can enquire about that which is 
 useful ; and that is useful to every man which is conformable to his own 
 constitution and nature.' ^ 
 
 / In this conception of the whole as good and under wise 
 
 and righteous guidance we see very clearly the bending of 
 
 ^ Midifafions, II. 17. - Ibid., VI. 44. 
 
THE IDEA OF BROTHERHOOD. 65 
 
 the heathen mind to the truth, which to him was still in 
 all its greatness and glory veiled. ' Lord, how manifold 
 are thy works ! in wisdom hast thou made them all.' ' All 
 thy works shall praise thee, Lord ; and thy saints shall 
 bless thee.' 
 
 A third point in which we can trace in Marcus Aurelius 
 the approximation of which we are speaking, is in his coni 
 ception of his duty to man, and of the true bond of humanity,-, 
 brotherhood — an idea which had dawned on the mind of 
 cultivated heathendom, mainly through the relations which 
 Eome had established between distant and once alien peoples, 
 but which had become a very vital idea to thinkers like 
 Marcus Aurelius. Take this as a specimen of the way in 
 which he handles the subject : — 
 
 ' For nothing is so productive of elevation of mind as to be able to 
 examine methodically and truly every object which is presented to 
 thee in life, and always to look at things so as to see at the same 
 time what kind of universe this is, and what kind of use everything 
 perfoi-ras in it, and what value everything has with reference to the 
 whole, and what with reference to man, who is a citizen of the highest 
 city, of which all other cities are but families.' ' 
 
 This will not fail to recall the words of a yet greater 
 teacher, ' For our citizenship is in heaven.' ' A city which 
 hath foundation, whose builder and maker is God.' 
 
 The following seems set in a very noble key : — 
 
 ' Begin the morning by saying to thy.self, I .shall meet with the busy- 
 body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these 
 things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good 
 and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is 
 beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him that 
 does wrong that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, 
 but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion 
 of the divijiitv, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one 
 can fix on me what is "gly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman nor 
 hate him. For we are made for co-operatiou, like feet, like hands, 
 like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act 
 
 ' ifeditalions, III. 11. 
 E 
 
66 MARCUS ADRELIUS. 
 
 against one another then is contrary to nature ; and it is acting 
 against one another to be vexed and to turn away.'^ 
 
 Again : — 
 
 ' Consider that a good disposition is invincible, if it be genuine ; and 
 not an affected smile or acting a part. For what will the most violent 
 man do to thee, if thou continuest to be of a kind disposition towards 
 hira, and if as opportunity oflFers thou gently admonishest him and 
 calmly correctest his errors at the very time when he is trying to do 
 thee harm, saying, not so, my child ; we are constituted by nature for 
 something else : I shall certainly not be injured, but thou art injuring 
 thyself, my child. . . And thou must do this not as if thou 
 
 wert lecturing him, nor yet that any bystanders may admire ; but 
 either when he is alone. . . .' ^ 
 
 Now this is no new doctrine in Philosophy. Socrates 
 lays it down in a noble passage, that the man who does 
 the wrong is the injured person, not the man who suffers 
 it. But here there is a tenderness in the tone, and a 
 delicacy in the mode of rebuke which remind one, more 
 than any other mere heathen utterance, of the words of our 
 Lord. 
 
 A passage in the 11th book of the Meditations on Schism 
 is in true accord with the doctrine of St. Paul. 
 
 Here then we have a body of teaching of very noble tone 
 and very pure and lofty spirit. Nothing in a higher key 
 than these thoughts of Marcus Aurelius has issued from 
 the heathen world. And it is clear that the passages 
 cpoted represent his matured convictions at his best moments. 
 They would not however give a faithful pictiire of Marcus 
 Aurelius as a Stoic philosopher, unless there were added foi 
 comparison some passages in which the fatal uncertainty 
 and despondency of all heathen thought appears. 
 
 ' Shortlived are both the praiser and the praised, and the rememberer 
 and the remembered, and all this in a nook of this part of the world ; 
 and not even here do all agree, no, not any one with himself ; and 
 
 ^Meditations, II. 1. "^Ihid., XL 18. 
 
UNCERTAIN UTTERANCES. 67 
 
 the whole earth too is a point.' ^ 'Such as bathing appears to thee— 
 oil, sweat, dirt, filthy water, all things disgusting — so is every part 
 of life and every thing.' ^ 'Generally wickedness does no harm at 
 all to the imiverse; and particularly the wickedness of one man does 
 no harm to another. It is only harmful to him who has it in his 
 power to be released from it, as soon as he shall choose.' 3 
 
 About immortality he utters an uncertain sound ; but 
 none can study his thoughts without perceiving how fre- 
 quently his mind was busy with the subject of death. 
 Yery noble and confident is this passage : — 
 
 'How can it be that the gods after having arranged all things well 
 and benevolently for mankind, have overlooked this alone that some ' 
 men, and very good men, and men who as we may say, have had most 
 communion with the divinity, and through pious acts and religious 
 observances have been most intimate with the divinity, when they have 
 once died should never exist again, but should be completely extin- 
 guished?'* 
 
 B\it then we have such sentences as these : — 
 
 'About death; whether it is a dispersion, or a resolution into atoms, 
 or annihilation, it is either extinction or change." 'That wln'ch ha.9 
 died falls not out of the universe. If it stays here it also changes here, 
 and is dissolved into its proper parts, which are elements of the universe 
 and of thyself. And these too change and they murmur not.'^ 
 
 And :— 
 
 'V/liat means all this? Thou hast embarked, thou hast made the 
 voyage, get out, thou art come to shore. If indeed to another life, 
 there is no want of gods not even there. But if to a state without 
 sensation, thou wilt cease to be held by pains and pleasiires, and to be 
 a slave in the vessel, which is as much inferior as that which serves it 
 is superior ; for the one is intelligence and deity, the other is earth 
 and cori-uption.'^ 'Near is thy forgetfulness of all things, and near 
 the forgetfulness of thee by all.'^ 
 
 And there is this amid much else on suicide : — 
 
 ' If men do not permit thee, then get away out of life, yet so as if 
 thou wert suffering no harm. The house is smoky, and I quit it. Why 
 dost thou think that this is any trouble ? '' 
 
 ^ Meditatiovs, VIII. 21. -Ibid., VIII. 24. ''Ibid., VIII. no. 
 
 ^Ibid.,XU.5. =/Jid., VII. 32. ^ Ibid., VIll. \8. 
 
 ■> Ibid., 111. 3. 8 /Wei., VII. 21. "/SjU.V. 29. 
 
68 MARCUS AURELIUS. 
 
 These extracts will suffice to sh^w that the uncertainty 
 of knowledge and the miseries of life sometimes mastered 
 him, and led him to give forth an uncertain sound about 
 the great realities of being with which every man has 
 supremely to do. This wavering doctrine of a solitary 
 thinker, however clear at times his intuitions, and however 
 pure and noble his life, could be no gospel to his fellow 
 sinners and fellow sufferers, from whose doubt and anguish 
 the cry for aid was already rising into the ear of heaven. 
 
 But now, in closing, let me quote a few of the very deep 
 and beautiful sayings with which the book of his Medi- 
 tations is gemmed, and in many of which we find a truly 
 wonderful likeness to some of the most notable sayings of 
 the Scriptures. 
 
 ' Since it is possible that thou mayest depart from life this very 
 moment, regulate every act and thought accordingly.' 
 
 ' Do not act as if thou wert going to live 10,000 years. Death hangs 
 over thee, while thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.' 
 
 'As physicians always have their instruments and knives ready for 
 cases which suddenly require their skill, so do thou have principles 
 ready for the understanding of things divine and human, and for doing 
 everything, even the smallest, with a recollection of the bond which 
 unites the divine and human to one another. For neither wilt thou 
 do any thing well which pertains to man without at the same time 
 having a reference to things divine, nor the contrary.' 
 
 'The art of life is more like the wrestler's art than the dancers, in 
 
 respect of this, that it should stand ready and firm to meet onsets 
 
 which are sudden and unexpected.' 
 
 r Tor there is one universe made up of all things, and one God who 
 
 / pervades all things, and one substance, and one law . . . and one 
 
 truth.' 
 
 ' And who has told thee that the gods do not aid us in things which 
 are in our power. Begin then to pray for such things and thou shalt 
 see. The mau prays thus, how shall I have that pleasure ? Do then 
 pray thus, how shall I not desire to have it. . . . Turn thy prayers 
 this way, and see what comes.' 
 
 ' The voice ought to be plainly written on the forehead, . . . the 
 good and simple and benevolent shew all these things in the eyes, and 
 there is no mistaking.' 
 
 'God sees the minds of all men bared.' 
 
HIS CLOSING WOEDS. 69 
 
 There is a sad dignity about the last words of the book. 
 Speaking to a man surprised by death and who says, I 
 have not iinished the five acts, but only three of them, he 
 answers : — 
 
 'Thou sayest well, but in life the three acts are the whole drama. 
 For what shall be a complete drama is determined by him who once 
 was the cause of its composition, and now of its dissolution. But thou 
 art the cause of neither. Depart then satisfied, for he also who releases 
 thee is satisfied.' 
 
 With these sad but patient words we will bid the most 
 gentle, the most benign, the most conscientious, the most 
 Christian of heathen philosophers farewell. 
 
IV. 
 AVHY COULD NOT THE STOIC EEGE^'ERATE SOCIETY? 
 
IV. 
 
 WHY COULD NOT THE STOIC REGENERATE SOCIETY? 
 
 No earnest and sympathetic student of the ancient pagan 
 philosophies can be blind to the gradual approximation of 
 the heathen to the Christian schools in the age of the Advent. 
 This approximation becomes more marked towards the close 
 of the first, and during the second century, when Christianity 
 had already put forth its regenerating power, mainly but not 
 exclusively in the lowest stratum of Roman society. Seneca 
 exhibits an enormous advance, measured by the moral 
 standard, on Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus, as well as on 
 Pansetius, by whom the Stoic doctrine was first made popular 
 in Rome. But Epictetus exhibits an advance even on Seneca, 
 and Marcus Aurelius on both. The improvement is not in 
 facility, fecundity, or strictly philosophical power. The later 
 Stoics show no tendency to walk in the steps of Chrysippus, 
 and to put forth many and profound philosophical treatises 
 about all things on earth and in heaven. They were, as we 
 have seen, increasingly disposed to confine themselves to moral 
 reflections and exhortations. They tried, in short, though 
 all unconscious of the magnitude and universality of the 
 need, to supply the kind of pastoral care and oversight, which 
 God was providing, not for the favoured few only, but for 
 the great mass of the poor, the ignorant, and the wretched, \J 
 in the ministry of the Christian Church. 
 
 Their ideas, moreover, on many of the most important 
 
74 THE STOIC FAILURE. 
 
 subjects of human knowledge were startlingly like the ideas 
 which the Gospel was about to make the common property 
 of mankind. There is no need to recapitiilate the argument 
 of the preceding lectures, or to requote the array of passages 
 in which this approximation to Christian ideas is conspicuous. 
 
 LJn some of these passages the likeness to texts of Scripture 
 is, not considerable, but complete. ' If you imitate the gods,' 
 writes Seneca, ' confer benefits even on the unthankful ; for 
 the sun rises even on the wicked, and the seas are open to 
 pirates._l ' God sees the minds of all men bared,' says Marcus 
 Aurelius, ' consider thyself to be dead, and to have completed 
 thy life up to the present time, and live according to Nature 
 the remainder which is allowed thee.' So, too, Epictetus, 
 ' When you have shut the doors and made darkness within, 
 remember never to say that you are alone, for you are not ; 
 but God is within, and your Dremon is within, and what 
 need of light have they to see what you are doing. To 
 this God you ought to swear an oath, just as the soldiers 
 do to Cffisar.' 
 
 In these passages and in others previously quoted we have 
 a body of very pure and lofty doctrine, that is thoroughly 
 
 7KZ!hristian up to a certain point in its ruling ideas ; — Man 
 the son of God, and bound therefore to live nobly after the 
 fashion of God, and not after the fashion of the brutes ; 
 Man surroimded by God with benedictions, mercies new every 
 morning, faithfulness every night, and bound to bear cheer- 
 fully life's burdens and trials and to be ever in a mood 
 not to moan but to praise ; Man, too, embraced in the bonds 
 
 ;> of a universal brotherhood, all men ha\ang within them a 
 portion of the divine nature, and therefore in the noblest 
 sense brethren ; all men constrained by these cords of love 
 to regard themselves as limbs of the great human body, so 
 that in ministering to their fellow men they are seeking their 
 own, as well as their brothers' good ! 
 
APPROACH TO CHRISTIAN IDEAS. 75 
 
 We note, further, that this approximation to Christian . 
 teaching is distinctly the result of a development. Something 
 passed over, or rather through, the heart of society in that 
 first century, which drew the thinkers in the direction of 
 Christian ideas, and at least prepared the way woudrously 
 for the Gospel. Generation by generation, as the Advent 
 drew near, men devoted themselves more and more to these 
 practical questions concerning personal duty, conduct and 
 destiny, questions which the Gospel would press with irre- 
 sistible force on human hearts, as the first stage of a re- 
 generation of society through all its spheres. When the 
 Church was already founded, and was quietly winning its 
 way upwards from the lowest stratum of society, where its 
 first work was mainly done, the utterances of the philosophers 
 grow more Christian in tone ; their ideas about God, about 
 man, about prayer, about praise, about duty, about the human 
 brotherhood, become saturated with the Christian spirit, until 
 in the last great heathen thinker, Marcus Aurelius, there isw 
 the following passage about the relation of one member of the 
 great body of human society to another, which it is hard to 
 believe was not taken bodily from the Epistles of St. Paul : — 
 
 'Just as it is with the members in those bodies which are united in 
 one, so it is with rational beings which exist separate, for they have 
 been constituted for one co-operation. And the perception of this will 
 be more apparent to thee, if thou often sa^st to thyself that I am a 
 member of the system of rational beings.'^ 
 
 This is clearly the doctrine of the Apostle, ' we are 
 members one of another.' 
 
 We call Marcus Aurelius the last great heathen thinker ; 
 but it is curious and interesting to note how the pagan 
 Stoic philosophy was revived again in the sixth century 
 in the poem of Boethius, concerning whom it is quite 
 an open question whether he was Christian at all. His 
 
 1 Meditaliona, VII. 1 ."?. 
 
76 THE STOIC FAILURE. 
 
 ' Consolation of Philosophy ' exercised a very profound influ- 
 ence upon the thought and feeling of nascent Christendom ; 
 it furnishes the basis of some of the deepest and most 
 pregnant utterances of our own Alfred the Great, who 
 translated the work and enlarged it \vith most beautiful 
 and powerful thoughts of his own ; and it has lent a 
 strong tincture to the literature of medieval society. It 
 was the last work dealing with Greek philosophy, prior 
 to the breaking up of the Empire, which stayed the study 
 of the literature of Greece for nearly a thousand years. 
 The last voice which sounded from the old classical civilisa- 
 tion through the thousand years during which Western 
 Christendom was growing to its manhood, was that of this 
 very noble teacher of the Stoic School. Through Boethius, 
 accordingly. Stoicism has become an appreciable factor in 
 the thought of Christendom, and carries on the ancient 
 philosophy into the life of the modern world. 
 
 What are we to say to these things, — to this Chris- 
 tianisation, up to a certain point, of heathen philosophy ? 
 "^ The first question concerns the true origin of this influence. 
 The point has been very keenly debated, whether this 
 S development of heathen philosophy in the Christian direc- 
 tion was not due directly to Christianity. Had not 
 Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurehus some knowledge 
 of the Gospel ; of the truths which it revealed, the duties 
 which it inculcated, and the hopes which it inspired ? It 
 has been contended very strenuously that this must have 
 been the case, or such startling repetitions — for they are 
 almost such — of sentences in the Gospels could not have 
 been found in the utterances of the heathen schools. 
 Seneca, it is said, for the hkeness is perhaps most con- 
 spicuous in his writings, must have seen and heard St. 
 Paul, or studied his Epistles, and hence the striking 
 analogies which may be traced. 
 
INDEPENDENCE OF REVELATION. 77 
 
 It is, however, very doubtful indeed whether any such 
 relation between the Stoics of the Empire and the teaching 
 of Eevelation can be established. The temptation is very 
 strong to suspect it ; but the more the matter is looked 
 into the less likely does the connection appear. The kind 
 of likeness, if it is to be accounted for in this way, would 
 imply a most thorough study of Eevelation, and in that 
 case a much larger proof of indebtedness would appear. 
 The philosophers could not have borrowed a few phrases 
 and a few ideas without borrowing much more. For it is 
 most important to note that these Christian adumbrations do 
 not appear anywhere as intrusive elements in an uncon- 
 genial system. They are not like borrowed ornaments 
 stuck on, but are thoroughly welded into the system 
 which they adorn ; it is all homogeneous. The whole 
 must have been borrowed, or none, and that the whole 
 was not borrowed appears to be established with absolute 
 certainty by the fact that there is no hint about so vitally 
 important a feature of the Christian scheme as the Resur- 
 rection ; no recognition in any shape of the great historic 
 facts on which Christianity rested its claim, and from 
 which it drew its power. We must hold it to be imposs- 
 ible that men of such candour and probity as the Stoic 
 teachers could have drawn this precious teaching from 
 the Gospels, without acknowledging the source of their 
 inspiration ; and equally impossible that they should have 
 spoken with such bitterness of the Christians, if they had 
 had the faintest suspicion that truths so like their own, 
 and yet so much larger and deeper, were to be found in 
 the Christian books. 
 
 These negative considerations seem to be really decisive 
 of the question. That the Stoic owes nothing directly toV 
 the Christian, may be regarded as established ; and this 
 is further confirmed by the fact that these apparently 
 
78 THE STOIC FAILDEE. 
 
 Christian utterances can be traced as the legitimate develop- 
 ment of the principles of the philosophy, and find fore- 
 
 ' shinings in the earliest doctrine of the School. That hymn 
 of Cleanthes to Zeus is really in the same key with the 
 doctrine of Epictetus. There is no evidence anywhere 
 that the Stoic writers had ever come across the Christian 
 or Jewish Scriptures, while there are abundant traces in 
 the poets and historians, as well as in the philosophic 
 treatises of the time, of a growth of the thoughts and the 
 sentiments of men towards the Christian view of man's 
 life, and of God. 
 
 Upon the supposition, again, that the Stoical philosophy, 
 that is the best thought of the heathen mind, was deeply 
 indebted to the truths of Eevelation, it is impossible to 
 account for the fact that some of the very best emperors, 
 including the most Christian thinkers of the Stoic School, 
 were persecutors. Marcus Aurelius speaks in one place with 
 bitterness of the Christians. He is describing the attitude of 
 a man who is ready to live or to die — but, he adds, 'let this 
 readiness come from a man's own judgment, not from mere 
 obstinacy as with the Christians ; but considerately and with 
 dignity, and in a way to persuade another, without tragic show.'-^ 
 It is a curious phenomenon, that not brutal emperors only like 
 Xero and Domitian were persecutors, but some of the wisest and 
 ablest down so late as the time of Diocletian ; and whatever 
 may be the true account of it, it entirely negatives the notion 
 
 ^ that they recognised any pure and elevating ideas in Christianity. 
 It is, however, quite in the natural order of things in such 
 an imperfect world as this, that the best rulers should have 
 been the sternest persecutors, seeing that they knew absolutely 
 nothing of Christianity, and regarded it as a secret and 
 mysterious system which set men resolutely against that 
 political order which in their sight constituted the only 
 ' Meditations, IX. 3. 
 
"WHY THE ROMANS PERSECUTED. 79 
 
 guarantee for the welfare of human society. The best 
 emperors, we must remember, had the highest conception 
 of what the Empire was to do for the world. In their 
 judgment it offered the one hope of the restoration of the 
 golden Saturnian reign. A spirit by which men were led 
 to question the imperial decrees, to judge them by some 
 unseen, unknown standard, and if they were found wanting, 
 to die rather than obey them, seemed to the rulers the very 
 principle of confusion. It was in their sight simple obstinacy 
 and malignity, because there was nothing within their sight 
 which could explain it. The Eomans were the most clement 
 of conquerors, the most tolerant of rulers, just because they 
 found nothing in the world which when once conquered was 
 intolerant of their rule. But a Sect which had an unseen 
 King of whom the Eomans knew nothing, but who was obeyed 
 with a fidelity which the Eoman scourge and axe could not 
 shake, seemed to them to strike at the very root of the order 
 of society. To them the Empire was the sacred thing ; the 
 better the ruler the more sacred was the Empire in his 
 sight. On such a one it appeared all the more incumbent 
 to strangle a Sect which dishonoured the majesty of the 
 Empire, a Sect that set above the head of the State — the 
 • prcescns Jupiter ' of his subjects — a King whom the legions 
 could not reach, and yet who wielded a power over His 
 people which cast that of the emperors quite into the shade. 
 
 Strictly parallel with the conduct of some of the wisest 
 and most clement of the emperors, is that of some of the 
 most sagacious and merciful of the Popes. The worst 
 Papal persecutors have not been, as a rule, the worst men 
 who have occupied the Pontifical throne. The worst men 
 did not care enough about the matter. It was the best 
 men, who had the largest idea of the blessing with which 
 the Church was charged for the world, who were most 
 impatient of any heresies which threatened to intercept it. 
 
80 THE STOIC FAILURE. 
 
 The Eoman Church has never cared very deeply about 
 the intellectual element in heresy. Men might think very 
 much as they pleased in the matter of head knowledge, if 
 they possessed an obedient heart, and were ready on all 
 critical occasions to submit to the authority of the Church. 
 A certain iilial state of mind was what the Church chiefly 
 desired in her children, a moral submission to her 
 influence rather than an intellectual consent to her creeds ; 
 and it was the disobedience in heretics which her best 
 rulers resented ; and that chiefly because of the ruin which 
 they believed the disobedience would work for them 
 and for the world. Therefore from very love to the souls 
 of men, though in blind unbelief in the power of the 
 truth to conquer in free conflict with error, did they set them- 
 selves to stamp out heresy in the blood of the heretics ; 
 and it was just the best rulers, who cared most for truth 
 and for souls, who were most open to the temptation, and 
 liave earned for themselves in history the evil name of 
 persecutors. 
 
 As it was in the Church, so was it to a great extent in 
 the Empire. The Eomans did not care very much what 
 men credited, so long as they believed in the empire, and 
 believed in its mission to rule society. But the men who 
 did not believe that, and had quite other notions of the 
 well-being of society, for which they were willing cheerfully 
 to die, the Empire instinctively laid under its ban. Such 
 men it could not afford to tolerate, but must at any cost 
 put them down. And it was just the men who believed 
 most thoroughly in the Eoman mission to rule the world, 
 that is, the best and most successful administrators, who 
 were least disposed to tolerate that mutiny in the camp 
 which called itself Christianity. So Marcus AureHus, among 
 others, became a persecutor, and this from his very anxiety 
 that no ' obstinacy,' as it seemed to him, should rob the 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMPIRE. 81 
 
 world of the blessing with which both the Stoic teaching 
 and the Eoman Empire were charged for mankind. The fact 
 of the persecution is, however, convincing evidence that no 
 direct influence came forth from the Gospel to the Stoic schools. 
 But while there was no direct influence it is very far 
 from certain that there was not a considerable indirect 
 influence, the real source of which the heathen mind was 
 "able to trace, but which told very strongly on the tone 
 of heathen thought. It is probable that the effect produced 
 by the Jews in the Empire was more considerable than 
 '"T is generally supposed. The Eomans hated them, and their 
 satirists scoffed at them, but that shews that they were 
 observed ; and in the great influx into Eome of Oriental 
 men and women, and Oriental thoughts and beliefs, some 
 knowledge of the great truths which the Jewish Scriptures 
 taught must have filtered into the Eoman world. There 
 would be no direct acquaintance with or study of the Scrip- 
 tures ; but the certainty of knowledge to which the Jews 
 had attained about the great matters in constant debate 
 among the philosophers, as well as the comparative moral 
 purity and elevation of the Jewish personal and domestic 
 life, must have exercised some influence in the circles which 
 surrounded their settlements ; while the feeling that cer- 
 tainty was attainable at any rate about the law of duty 
 and that Philosophy was not worth much if it was not 
 operative on the life, a feeling which was growing stronger 
 generation by generation in the Eoman schools, may have 
 derived some little nourishment from this spring. 
 
 When Christianity arose, the likelihood of such an influence 
 would be immensely increased. The Jews made proselytes 
 no doubt, and numerous ones ; but on the whole they lived 
 apart. The Christians made converts by the myriad, in all 
 classes of society, and had no desire to isolate themselves. 
 Theirs was emphatically a missionary faith. The moment 
 
82 THE STOIC FAILURE. 
 
 ,a man was converted to Christianity he sought to convert 
 his neighbours, and in every way strove to make known 
 his beliefs. The Christians were everywhere; in the army, 
 in the imperial household, and above all among the slaves, 
 who were then in close contact with the higher classes of 
 society. Seneca associated with his slaves and had them 
 to his table ; and the fact that there was this new life, full 
 of power, joy, hope, stirring in so many hearts and kindling 
 in so many eyes, must have lent something to the atmo- 
 
 ~~a2here of the times which the philosophers drank in — some- 
 thing vital, something stimulating, something hopeful, which 
 acted strongly, though they did not understand its nature and 
 springs, on their ideas and on their lives. Moral elements 
 may be in the air, and infuse a power into the hearts and 
 lives of men, the source of which, the exact character of 
 which, they cannot trace. So we may be sure that the 
 phristian certainty, the Christian joy and hope, and above 
 all the Christian charity, vitalised the atmosphere of the 
 Roman world during those first two centuries of the Empire ; 
 and had something, and not a little, to do with that firmer 
 assurance, that stronger hope, that wanner and more uni- 
 versal love, which characterised the teaching of the heathen 
 Schools, in the generations in which Christianity was winning 
 its way to the hegemony of the civilised world. 
 
 We have traced then a very clear advance in the tone 
 and temper of these heathen Schools ; resulting in a certain 
 approximation to the teaching of Christianity about God, 
 and about the nature, duties and destinies of man. It has 
 been established too that this advance cannot be traced 
 directly to Christianity itself; it is not a theft from the higher 
 system, but an independent evolution in the philosophical 
 Schools, a natural and necessary progress. The thought will 
 immediately occur, how would it have been had this develop- 
 
ADVANCE IN THE HEATHEN SCHOOLS. 83 
 
 ment been left to itself? Philosophy was evidently working 
 towards the ideas which Christianity found so powerful to 
 influence mankind. Would not Philosophy if left alone 
 have at last evolved these ideas, and have undertaken and 
 accomplished from its own basis the regeneration of society ? 
 Before the attempt is made to answer that question, we 
 must try to dispose of a preliminary consideration, which is 
 not always set in its proper light. Some think that this 
 advance of Philosophy in the Christian direction makes 
 Philosophy the co-ordinate of the Gospel ; so that they 
 ought to be regarded as two rival powers, sharing between 
 them the homage of the world. On the contrary, the truth 
 is that this remarkable development which has been traced, 
 makes Philosophy what the Law was to the Jews — ^the i 
 schoolmaster_tp_bring men to Christ. It gives some colour 
 to that notion of Clemens Alexandrinus that God had three 
 covenants with men, the Legal, the Philosophic and the 
 Christian. What does ' the fulness of the time ' mean ; the 
 time when man was ready for the Gospel, was pining for 
 the Gospel, and when a Gospel might be preached with a 
 hope of blessed success ? Does it not mean that man must 
 advance a certain stage along the road of development, 
 socially, intellectually and morally, before he could fully 
 appreciate the teachings of the Gospel, before the appetite 
 was awakened which the Gospel only could satisfy ? This 
 progress in Philosophy was precisely the awakening of the 
 appetite. It is quite in the harmony of the ways of God, 
 that man in his appointed ' feeling after God if haply he 
 might find Him ' should be led to those thoughts about God, 
 those longings for clearer light, for purer, nobler life, which 
 alone could be satisfied by Eevelation ; should in fact come by 
 his own effort under Divine guidance to the point where he 
 could advance no further, where God met him with the Gospel, 
 and led him into a higher, larger, and more fruitful sphere. 
 
84 THE STOIC FAILURE. 
 
 It must be remembered, and it is essential to the true 
 imderstanding of our subject, that the regeneration of 
 I society began q^uite out of the pro-\dnce of the philosopher-:. 
 That a regeneration was accomplished, and that it was 
 accomplished by Christianity, is unquestionable. The only 
 point is, Was not Philosophy in a fair way of carrying out 
 the task when it wa.s interrupted by Christianity. The 
 philosophers were working in the higher social region : 
 Christianity began at the other end of the scale. Born 
 among a despised and hated people, it everywhere won con- 
 verts among the humblest classes of society. This was not 
 exclusi-^ely the case ; scholars, Eabbis, captains, senators, 
 Aieopagites, men of all positions and degrees of culture joined 
 the movement ; but the great ma.ss of the disciples carne 
 from the ranks of the poor — ' For you see your calling, 
 brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not 
 many mighty, not many noble are called.' 
 
 ■Soon, in all the chief cities of the Eoman world, there was 
 gathered a band of Christian disciples who lived in the 
 closest brotherly fellowship, who ministered to each other 
 freely of their substance, who allowed no bitter poverty to 
 exist among their members, who were pledged by the most 
 sacred and binding of all pos.sible constraints to industry, 
 honesty, purity, and self-renouncing senice to mankind. 
 "Were there sick, they tended them : were there huniay. 
 they fed them ; were there wronged, they righted them ; 
 plague had no terrors for them when .sufierin^ called them 
 to minister, pain had no menace when duty called them to 
 endure. In face of the iUs and woes of life they were 
 ' always rejoicing ' ; the slow decay and wasting of the 
 body, which so saddened the heathen, they watched with 
 exultation ; they had, not composure, but sonars of triumph 
 as they stood face to face with inevitable death. As a rule 
 uncultured ; poor, ignorant, common-place working men and 
 
PHILOSOPHY AT ITS LIMITS. 85 
 
 women ; artisiuis, soldiers, fishermen, beggars and slaves ; they 
 had yet learnt and could live this pure and lofty life. Industry, 
 home life, brotherly fellowship, piety, worship, were all regener- 
 ated by them, and there was about them and their community, 
 their Church, a glow of life which was contagious. Their 
 doctrine, their practice, caught like flame from home to home^ 
 from village to village, from city to city, from land to land ; 
 and everywhere with the same results. Society was new- 
 born wherever their Gospel penetrated, and began living a 
 new life with a vigour, a joy, a hope, an onward upward 
 pressure, which for ages had been utterly unknown in the 
 heathen world. Philosophy went on its way among the'' 
 higher classes ; but it laid absolutely no hold on men at 
 large. The reformation which it wrought in a few elect 
 spirits, failed utterly to spread downwards to the mass of 
 mankind. The poor were not touched by it ; society was 
 not helped by it ; its noblest men, and they grew fewer and 
 fewer generation by generation, bewailed bitterly the universal 
 indifference. The Schools dwindled into a mere University^ 
 system of culture ; Christianity developed into a religion for I 
 the civilised world. 
 
 And the question is What is the reason of the difference ? 
 Is it largely a matter of accident, or was Christianity merely 
 a higher system of Philosophy, working from the same basis 
 but with greater advantages, to results which the continually 
 advancing ideas of the philosophers, had they been let alone, 
 would equally have achieved ? 
 
 Let us understand that it was not new ideas, which, as 
 introduced by Christianity, wrought the result. New ideas 
 it had in abundance, but new ideas were not the secret of 
 its power. The essential matter in the Gospel was that it"^ 
 was the history of a Life. It was a tale of fact that all 
 could understand, that all could believe, that all could love. 
 It differed fundamentally from Philosophy, because it appealed i 
 
86 THE STOIC FAILURE. 
 
 ^ not to culture but to life. And wherever Kfe was fullest 
 and strongest, wherever hearts beat quickest, wherever 
 hands worked hardest, wherever pain smote deepest, where- 
 ever tears fell fastest, there it found the audience that best 
 ujiderstood it, and with which it knew that it had most to 
 do. And why ? Because its message was not a doctrine 
 how to hve, but a record of how a Man had Hved, a ]\lan 
 who, the Christians believed and the world has come to 
 believe, could lay upon His words and works the emphasis 
 of Incarnate 'God. The testimony was that this Life of 
 piety, purity, charity, and unselfish devotion to the service 
 of man, had been lived perfectly in our world by the 
 Sou of God, who made the world, and who had died to 
 reveal God's righteousness and God's tenderness to wretched 
 sinners, and to commend His life as an ei^ample, not 
 hopeless of attainment, to every human heart. The Christians 
 lived as brethren because this Son of God had called them 
 brethi'en ; they wrought and suffered, they mastered passion 
 and mortified hist, and faced death ^vith a lofty joy, because 
 the Lord had not only left them His example, but was 
 working in them and enabling them to fulfil His command- 
 ment and to gladden His heart. It was the spell of 
 substantial facts, li-sing facts, which the Gospel laid on 
 them, the spell of a personal loyalty to a personal Lord : 
 and those who have not mastered the difference between 
 
 — V a philosopher's speculations about life, and the actual record 
 of a life which, in aU that makes life holy and beautihi], 
 transcended the philosopher's most pure and lofty dreams, 
 have not imderstood yet the rudiments of the reason whv 
 the Stoic could not, whUe Christianity could and did, re- 
 generate society. 
 
 Christ alone among all great rehgious teachers felt that the 
 tale of His Life and Death would be the Gospel for the world. 
 Not what He taught merely, but what He was and what 
 
VITAL FORCE OF THE GOSPEL. 87 
 
 He did, was the Gospel ; and therefore, because it belonged 
 to the region of life, it came with such vital impact to the 
 heart of mankind. Everywhere, as if a fresh shock from some 
 ^'ital battery had struck them, men began, when its message 
 reached them, to live: and everywhere within the sphere of 
 the Church's influence there was light, love, energy, and hope. 
 And the fundamental reason was that the Church could tell 
 the eager wistful world, not what man thought about God, 
 which knowledge must be always as limited and variable as 
 man's understanding, but what God thought about man, said to 
 man, did for man, and was doing and would do for man 
 through eternity. Speculations about God, about life, about 
 duty, about destiny, must always be utterly without form and 
 substance, mere mists in cloudland, to the great mass of un- 
 cultivated men. When the world for the first time heard with 
 faith, not what God might be supposed to think, feel, and pur- 
 pose ; but what God had thought, said, and done in our world, 
 then began upon earth that vital movement which has issued 
 in the regeneration of human society. 
 
 The fatal defect in Philosophy was that it could never get ^ 
 men fairly out of their own shadow. The philosopher was 
 always necessarily the centre to his world ; aU hung on his 
 own thoughts, feelings, convictions, and powers, and man can 
 never ' Sink into himself and rise redeemed.' The religion of 
 wliich the individual man is the centre can never lay hold 
 on men, because what man needs most profoundly is to escape t 
 from himself; yet not to escape only, but to escape from 
 and yet possess himself. Escape of one kind was always easy 
 to the philosopher. As we hare seen, the noblest of them, 
 Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, as well as the most accom- 
 plished of them, Seneca, always kept in view the resource of 
 suicide. But what gospel could ' escape by suicide ' be to 
 the masses, when the very wisest and loftiest minds, by lifelong 
 meditation, could rise no nearer to certainty than a 'perhaps 
 
88 THE STOIC FAILURE. 
 
 as to what was beyond ? Men wanted to lose themselves and 
 yet keep themselves; and Philosophy could not help them; 
 those only had mastered the secret who buried their lower 
 baser self when through Christ they died to sin, and who found 
 a new and higher self in God : ' I live, yet not I, but Christ 
 liveth in me ; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live 
 by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave him- 
 self for me.' 
 
 The subject before us is not, however, why the Gospel 
 could, but why the Stoic could not, regenerate society. The 
 utter want of clear certainty in the doctrine was fatal to any 
 deep or wide- spread religious influence upon men. We do 
 right to take at the very highest possible value the work 
 which the philosophers accomplished for the moral and intel- 
 lectual development of man. It was an important, not to 
 say essential, element in 4he preparation of humanity for the 
 coming of Christ. It is a mistake to sneer at the Alexand- 
 rian school of Christian thought. Many crudities, many 
 absurdities, we may find in the pages of its chief doctors, 
 but the attempt it made was a noble one. Its endeavo^^r 
 was, not to blend Christianity with the highest results of 
 human thought, and so make a new amalgam which should 
 neither be Christianity nor Philosophy but a mingling of both; 
 but rather to find room in the Christian scheme and in the 
 Christian life for truths and modes of experience as old as the 
 creation and as wide-spread as humanity, and so to enlarge 
 the dogma of Christianity as to make it intellectually, as it 
 was spiritually, the religion of the world. But men wanted 
 not to guess, or to think, but to know, the truths on which they 
 were to build their Sion. A system of truth which could 
 never rise higher than the speculations of a human brain, 
 might be an admirable culture, but could never be a religion 
 to mankind. The best of the Stoics talked indiff'erently about 
 the gods and about God ; now about dissolution into the 
 
WHY PHILOSOPHY FAIJLED. 89 
 
 elements, and then again about conscious existence after 
 death ; sometimes, though feebly, about sin, and sometimes 
 about the force that is working through all, saint and sinner 
 alike, the great harmony of life ; here about tender pity for 
 the poor, the maimed, the wretched, there about all calamities 
 being things indifferent, which a man should steel himself to 
 reckon no calamities at all ; on one occasion about gladness in, 
 all the gifts of Providence, and on another about stern and 
 persistent defiance of Fate. And the uncertainty lay in the 
 organ ; it was inherent in the philosopher's method ; in the 
 nature of things there was no possibility that if it had been 
 left to work with the stage all to itself, it could have spoken 
 a clear word of certainty to men about the unseen verities. 
 
 Philosophy was entirely powerless to combine, confederate; — 
 and command men. There was no Power above them all 
 which commanded the assent of their understandings, and 
 which spoke with authority alike about truth and about life. 
 They were scattered stars in the sky, with no visible order 
 and no particular function in relation to the great mass of 
 mankind. The doctrine of Christ came like the sun, and then 
 everyone felt that he lived in an orderly and divinely governed 
 world. The philosophers devoted themselves with honest inten- 
 tion to minister to human want and pain, and to be at hand 
 with a seasonable word on all the great occasions of life. But 
 all depended on the individual thinkers ; there was no authority 
 above them to commit this ministry as a charge to them, and 
 to raise up in each generation a kindred band. There was ,/ 
 nothing in Philosophy which could create a new organ of^ 
 ministry, and sustain it as it worked in the world in an 
 ever-widening circle, in concert with the ever-widening per- 
 ception of human need. The philosophers rose and taught 
 and passed away, each, as it were, at his own will. In the 
 Church men found an institution which could be depended 
 upon for the supply of that service for which the world was 
 
90 THE STOIC FAILURE. 
 
 pining, and which had become an imperative need of man- 
 kind. There was that in Christianity which called forth, 
 constrained, and inspired the service, and which assured to 
 the world age after age successive and ever-increasing com- 
 panies of teachers and ministers. Christianity sent these 
 out generation by generation with a vigour which was never 
 paralysed for a moment, even in the darkest days of ignor- 
 ance and wretchedness, days in which the philosopher utterly 
 vanished ; and this was because that vigour was fed from a 
 perennial celestial spring. 
 
 Through all the ages there was a unity in the Christian 
 teaching, and in the Christian service, because these were not 
 
 /''dependent on the ever- varying thoughts and impulses of man, 
 but on the Word and the Will of One who remained ' the same 
 yesterday, and to-day, and for ever,' and who had the power 
 to call forth men to be His messengers and ministers accord- 
 ing to His righteous and unerring will. There is abundant 
 play of individual thought and individual character under 
 the Christian system. The sects of Christians have been 
 more numerous than the sects of the philosophers. But the 
 Christians have had the conviction that above all the sects 
 there is the Truth which changes not and fails not, and which 
 is ever working on the sects, correcting their error, enlarging 
 their narrowness, and leading them into fuller knowledge and 
 nobler life ; and it is hardly possible to estimate the influence 
 that this conviction about the absolute eternal Truth possessed 
 by all the Christian Schools, has exercised on man in the 
 moral, intellectual, and political spheres. 
 
 The Christians, moreover, threw themselves into tliis 
 ministry with consuming passion. There was no passion 
 
 y in Philosophy, nothing to inspire passion. But the Church 
 was aglow with ardour. A host of eager, enthusiastic mini- 
 sters started forth when the love of Christ had laid its 
 constraint on their spirits, and threw themselves with the 
 
THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE. 91 
 
 instmct of conquerors on the sin, the vice, the wretchedness 
 of the world. Round the disciples hope breathed wherever 
 
 they moved ; around the philosophers the lassitude of in-) 
 
 difference or the paralysis of despair. 
 
 Very deeply connected with the helplessness of Philosophy 
 to meet the profounder needs, and satisfy the imperious 
 cravings of mankind, was its teachmg, or want of teachingf.^' 
 ahoutan^ Stoicism as we have seen was a doctrine of 
 self-gratulation, and the Stoic was a Pharisee at heart. V 
 The world needed beyond everything to be convinced of 
 sin, righteousness, and judgment ; and only when the con- 
 viction of sin was brought into its heart, with the promise of 
 deliverance, did it begin to look up and live. The most terrible 
 vices were rampant in the society in which Epictetus, Seneca, 
 and Marcus Aurelius moved ; but they pass them lightly )jy. 
 When Paul ' reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judg- 
 ment to come, Felix trembled.' So the world trembled before 
 the Christian preachers, as it never trembled, and never 
 could tremble, before the Stoics, and that fear was the 
 beginning of its regeneration. For through the world a 
 message ran, which was never heard in the Stoic Schools, 
 ' Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of 
 the world.' That message wrought conviction of sin, it 
 proclaimed forgiveness of sin, it promised victory over sin — 
 and from that hour the struggle of man against the evil 
 which was destroying him, acquired the sanctity and 
 intensity of a crusade. And then, from the Gospel of the 
 forgiveness of sin, sprang forth the passion of the Divine 
 Love. 
 
 Here we touch the last, the deepest reason why Phil-v 
 osophy could never be a religion to man, nor exercise a 
 regenerating power on society. Its gospel was essentially V 
 a loveless gospel. It is love which kindles the eye, fires 
 the blood, and strains the energies to their highest tension 
 
92 THE STOIC FAILURE. 
 
 The world which had listened coldly to the philosophers, 
 with no stirring of a pulse of passion or of hope, started 
 literally into new life when this gospel was preached to it : — 
 ' The love of Christ constraiiieth us ; because we thus jiidge, 
 that if one died for all, then did all die : and that he 
 died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live 
 unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and 
 rose again.' 
 
V. 
 
 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM, AND ITS RELATION TO THE 
 LIFE OF THE CHURCH. 
 
THE MONASTIC SYSTEM, AND ITS EELATION TO THE 
 LIFE OF THE CHUECH. 
 
 When Epictetus urged his disciples to set before them some 
 man of supreme excellence, and to imagine themselves always 
 in his presence, had he quite forgotten how bitterly he had 
 complained that no true Stoic could be found, no man in 
 whom he could discern the realisation of his ideal ? But 
 even while Epictetus was teaching, myriads of his fellow men 
 had found One whom they could at once worship with the 
 profoundest reverence, and love with the most passionate 
 devotion ; One who had laid hold on all which they believed 
 to be the higher elements of their nature, and who drew 
 them by a resistless spell into the path of self-abnegation, 
 self-devotion and ministry to manliind, which He had trodden 
 Himself to the last extremity of shame and death. The great 
 mass of mankind, the ignorant, the poor, the enslaved — 
 shut out inevitably, not in any wise by the jealousy of 
 the philosophers, but by the very nature of things, from 
 the wisdom of the Schools — had found, or, as St. Paul says, 
 had been found by, a Being who stirred and swayed them 
 with a force and absoluteness till then unknown ; and who 
 inspired them with a love so passionate and absorbing that 
 poverty, bonds, wounds and death were no longer terrible, 
 but beautiful and glorious, if they might but express the 
 depth of their devotion to their Saviour, and translate them 
 more swiftly to His sphere. 
 
96 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM. 
 
 This passionate personal love to Christ is a feature of the 
 Christian life of the early centuries which no wise student 
 of their history will underrate. In the earlier Christian 
 ages, it is not too much to say that Christendom was fairly 
 drunk with the new wine of the Spirit. A new power 
 from heaven had fallen upon men and filled them with 
 rapture. Nothing is more notable, in the comparison of 
 the Christian and the Pagan literatures of the first and 
 second centuries, than the tone of exhilaration which breathes 
 through the one, and the sadness, the hopelessness which 
 characterise the other. This, probably, quite as much as the 
 ' non cloquimur magna, sed vivimus,' explains the power 
 which Christianity wielded from the first over the mass of 
 mankind. And this love to Christ manifested itself in forms 
 of imitation often very wildly extravagant, but not altogether 
 marvellous to those who know to its depths the passion of 
 human love. The stigmata of St. Francis, whatever may 
 be the truth of that marvellously attested phenomenon, are 
 really but the culmination of what the higher class of mon- 
 astics — and these are the men to be studied — were pining 
 and panting after through all the monastic ages. To imitate 
 Christ in the form of His life, while they drank inwardly its 
 inspiration, was their highest thought and hope. And it was 
 inevitable, surely, that the Christian life should, in the most 
 earnest, take the form of a studious outward 'tepKod'iietion' under 
 the constraint of an absorbing passion, before the world could 
 rise to the comprehension (partly through this experiment,) of 
 the inner meaning of the life of Jesus, and the true character 
 of its influence on mankind. To live as He lived, poor, 
 homeless, way-faring, and apart from domestic cares and joys, 
 was the ideal of the Christian life which the first ages cher- 
 ished. The poverty of Christ, His simple trust, like that 
 of the birds and the lilies, His homeless lot, His virgin life, 
 were all made the objects of eager and passionate imitation. 
 
FANATICISM OF EARLY ASCETICS. 97 
 
 In all this there was much that to some may savour of 
 fanaticism, but the truth is that we must make up our minds 
 to a large measure of pure fanaticism in all, save one, of 
 the great movements which have strongly influenced the 
 course of human affairs. All save one. Christ was no fan- 
 atic. He gladdened alike marriage festivals, cottage homes, 
 and mourners by new-made graves ; and we are tempted to 
 think that the larger spirit of Christ's teaching might have 
 taught the early saints a nobler lesson than that which they 
 drew from the study of some outward forms of the life of 
 the Lord. We must however be largely tolerant of fanaticism 
 if we wish to scan with a sympathetic eye the page of human 
 history. Such is the weakness, the want of balance in our 
 nature, and such is the proneness of society to be moved, 
 not by what appeals calmly and solidly to its reason, but 
 by what strikes strongly its imagination or touches its heart, 
 that no great principle ever gets thoroughly wrought into 
 the texture of human beliefs, and becomes a constant factor 
 in the life of the race, without the agency of a strong fanaticism 
 in those who first forced it on the attention of mankind. 
 
 The fanaticism dies out, as all excess dies out, in con- 
 fusion and shame, but not until it has done its work, and 
 compelled men to recognise and reverence what was of vital 
 worth in the schemes of the man or the school thus brought 
 into prominence. Society works into its own life the life that 
 was in them, and lets the foam and the fury die away. 
 Monachism was a strong fanaticism ; and so too was scholar- 
 ship at the Eevival of Learning; the worship of the letter 
 of the Bible at the Puritan era was a strong fanaticism ; 
 the Total Abstinence movement is a fanaticism now. When 
 we approach the study of the influence of the religious life 
 on Christendom, we must accept the fanaticism as inevitable, 
 we must understand that it is as much the condition of getting 
 certain great moral ideas into the heart of Christian society. 
 
98 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM. 
 
 as the fever heat around a healing wound is the condition 
 of its cure. We may smile, if we will, at the fanatics, and 
 give thanks, if we will, that we are not as one of them; 
 though the smug contentment of modern society with its 
 posture and its achievements makes some fanaticisms look very 
 lofty and noble indeed. 
 
 Furthermore — and this is a truth important to the 
 understanding of the influence of the monk on mediaeval 
 life — we must be prepared, with a nature like ours and 
 in a world like this, for great drawbacks in the very noblest 
 work, much more in that which is only partially noble. 
 Look at even our almsgiving ; the saddest thing to a 
 generous heart is the question which wUl force itself on us, 
 whether the harm that we do by it does not more than 
 balance the good. All great social movements seem to have 
 blessing in one hand and bane in the other, and we are 
 happy if we can rest in the conviction that on the whole, after 
 the balance is struck, the cause of progress gains. Terribly 
 slowly, we say sometimes in our weak impatience, the 
 kingdom of light and truth advances. The great influences 
 which act on each generation do so much to hinder as 
 well as so much to help, that we must be thankful if we 
 see, as thank Heaven we do see, age by age a slight 
 advance, a slow lifting up of human society; doubly happy 
 if we can trace it day by day in our own individual lives. 
 
 There is so nuich weakness, so much perverseness, so 
 much foolishness in every one of us, that we should be 
 prepared for a very large infusion of the same sad elements 
 in every great instit\ition which has wrought strongly on 
 the development of the world. Take despotism ; take 
 aristocracy ; take democracy ; take commerce, nay take our 
 present idol constitutional monarchy, which of them is 
 charged with clear unmingled blessing to man ? So the 
 religious life, as the monastic profession got to be called, 
 
MEDIAEVAL SAINTHOOD ASCETIC. 99 
 
 had, without any doubt, very much baseness mingled with 
 Its nobleness, and many degrading destructive influences to 
 set against those which have helped to beat down selfishness, 
 gluttony, impurity, and brutality in man. We may be 
 quite sure that an institution which stretched its vital 
 influence on Europe through a thousand years, and gave 
 to the world such men as Benedict, Columba, Gregory, 
 Bede, Boniface, Anselm, Bernard and Francis — all of them 
 passionately de^'oted to their vocation — had on the whole 
 a balance of blessing to its account. It will of course 
 be understood that though it is the purpose of this chapter 
 to set forth something of the good the monks wrought for 
 Christendom, it would be possible, were that the matter 
 in hand, to say, not as much, but very much, on the 
 opposite side. 
 
 Nay, more, we are wont to criticise from the lofty height 
 of our advanced civilisation, from the vantage ground of 
 our admirably wise and noble social habits and actions, 
 the austere excesses of these fanatical champions of purity 
 and self-devotion. Well ! when we look round on some 
 of the features of our own age, when we survey the vices 
 and follies of any age, we may find something that does 
 not amuse or amaze, but rather impresses and stimulates 
 us, as we see Benedict rolling himself in thorns to quench 
 the fever of his blood ; or Bernard trying, not how much, 
 but how little, he could eat in his lonely cell ; or Francis 
 stripping himself to one coarse cloak of serge, as he went 
 forth to tend the plague-stricken and wretched, as hungry, 
 as poor, as homeless as his Lord ! 
 
 What would the Middle Ages have been without their 
 Saints ? As the saintly image was distinctly monastic from 
 the fourth century to the thirteenth, this is equivalent to the 
 question. What would the Middle Ages have been without 
 
100 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM. 
 
 their hermits, monks, and nuns ? St. Louis, in the thir- 
 teenth century, marks the dawning of a new era. The 
 great saintly iigure of that time is a king and a layman. 
 It is the age of the Ijirth of a vernacular literature in the 
 Western European kingdoms ; it is the age of popular 
 movements which bring the great third estate on to the 
 arena of political action ; it is the age in which the West 
 reaps fully the social and commercial fruit of the Crusades. 
 It is deeply significant that in such an age one of the 
 ablest and lousiest monarchs in Christendom won a repu- 
 tation for saintHness, which few Churchmen can rival. It 
 is prophetic of that sanctification of secular life, that 
 passing forth of the ' religious ' idea into a wider world, 
 which was the real meaning of the Eeformation, and of 
 all the most \ital movements in the Church during the 
 last three centuries. The influence of the Saint during 
 the ages of which we write (and every monk and nun 
 was saintly to the seculai' herd), was the influence of the 
 Church in its most intense and concentrated form. And 
 it reacted on the Church most mightily, and continually 
 nourished its power to influence and rule society. We 
 must not confoimd the influence of the Church with the 
 whole influence of the Gospel — that is, of the ideas and 
 powers which Christ Ijrought visibly to bear on mankind. 
 That was a much larger matter, and must be sought equally 
 in the development of the social life and political institu- 
 tions of the nations which inherited, thanks largely to the 
 monastics, the Christian traditions and polity of Eome. The 
 ' religious life ' was, as it were, the electric jar into which 
 all the most vital forces of the Church were gathered, and 
 whence they discharged themselves on society. And the 
 Church represents incomparably the most powerful of the 
 many influences which were moulding the life of Europe 
 during the earlier Middle Ages. 
 
A TRUE CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 101 
 
 The toi-mation of Christian society was the great problem of 
 Providence during all those ages. Alas ! it is the great pro- 
 blem still. To form a Christian community or communities 
 in limited areas within the bosom of the wider society, named 
 in contrast the world, has too easily satisfied our conception of 
 what is to be desired and aimed at for the accomplishment of 
 the Divine purpose. This was not Iwwever the aim — if we 
 read history rightly — of the Divine workman through the 
 Middle Age. The formation of Christian society is quite 
 another and a larger matter. A society which should be 
 Christian in its very foundations, and in which the ideas of 
 Christianity should be recognised in all the relations of men 
 and all the duties of life — this is what we must understand 
 by Christian society. It is a society of which the law of 
 C4od as revealed in Christ is recognised as the basis, and in 
 which men acknowledge that their rights and duties must be 
 referred to a supreme standard in the will of God. And 
 no student of history can fail to see that the recognition of 
 the Christian basis and constitution of society was characteristic 
 of the Western European nations during their formative ages — 
 that is from the fifth century when the seed of the Teutonic 
 nationalities began to be sown in the fertile, because dis- 
 integrated, soil of the decaying Eoman Empire, to the 
 thirteenth, when these nationalities assume their full form 
 and enter on their manly career. 
 
 These national communities were Christian societies because 
 they confessed Christ. It is easy to understand that those 
 who have only glanced at the troubled surface of mediaeval 
 life, and have heard or read of its wild doings, its sanguinary 
 strifes, its cruel tyrannies, may be tempted to exclaim. This 
 confession of Christ seems to have been a very low, poor, 
 carnal confession, scarcely worthy of the name. And surely 
 they would be right. But I imagine that this is precisely 
 what the angels are thinking about ours. I know not any 
 
102 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM. 
 
 Christian society upon earth which does more than strive 
 in a very feeble and trembling fashion to order its life after 
 the Christian law. £nvy, hatred, malice, littleness, selfish- 
 ness, worldliness, sins against which we are always witnessing 
 and from which we are always striving, with but partial 
 success, to free ourselves, may seem to the unseen watchers 
 as grossly carnal as the strong, bold evils of medite^'al society 
 seem to us. Xone can hope to understand the Middle Age 
 who cannot see that the effort to be Christian was the key 
 to its vital development. And, therefore, without forgetting 
 that the breath of the Divine Spirit is abroad in the very 
 air around us, and streams in upon us by a thousand channels 
 of nature and of life, we are justified in affirming that the 
 Church, which held the Christian standards and cherished 
 the Christian ideals, was the most powerful visible agent at 
 work on the nations of Western Europe during the Middle 
 Ages. In truth, the history of the Church, up to the time 
 of the development of a national life and a national literature 
 in those Western nations — which dates from about the thir- 
 teenth century — is in the largest sense the history of mediteval 
 society. 
 
 The influence of the monastic principle on the world at 
 large, including Asiatic, Jewisli, Oriental, and Western mona- 
 chism, forms an important chapter wherever comparative 
 religion is scientifically studied. Altogether the most vital 
 and fruitful portion of the subject concerns the influence of 
 the Benedictine rule on the development of Western Europe. 
 
 We must not stay to enquire, where was the original home 
 of ascetism. It is certain that in the far East monachism of the 
 most pronounced type had run its course ages before it was 
 heard of in the Christian Church. It seems, however, inevit- 
 aljle that some such institution as the monastic should have 
 arisen in Christendom. It was in a measure necessary that 
 that form of the Christian life should be tried thoroughly and 
 
STARTLING PHEASES IN THE GOSPELS. 103 
 
 on a large scale ; it was necessary that it should be tried and 
 should fail, though in failing it was to leave noble legacies 
 of influence to Christian society. Idolaters of the word of 
 Scripture — and the word is certain to be idolised before it is 
 apprehended with full intelligence — find sentences there which 
 the severest ascetic discipline seems alone to satisfy. Hegel 
 says that nowhere are there to be found such revolutionary 
 utterances as in the Gospels. Hegel is right, but let no red 
 revolutionist think that either their letter or their spirit will 
 help him. The first thing he will find, if he reads the New 
 Testament honestly, is that it lays the axe to the root of his 
 arrogance, his impatience, his self-will, and his idea that 
 Society can be a God to itself All fruitful revolution begins 
 from within. Some of the sentences of the New Testament 
 are, however, startling enough — 
 
 ' Jesus said unto him. If thou wouldest be perfect, go, sell that thou 
 hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven ; and 
 come, follow me ' (Matt. xix. 21). 
 
 ' And he said unto all. If any man would come after me, let him deny 
 himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whosoever would 
 save his life shall lose it ; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake, the 
 same shall save it ' (Luke ix. 23, 24). 
 
 ' If any man cometh unto me, and liateth not his father and mother, and 
 wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, 
 he cannot be my disciple ' (Luke xiv. 26). 
 
 ' And as they went in the way, a certain man said unto him, I will 
 follow thee whithersoever thou goest. And Jesus said unto him, The 
 foxes have holes, and the birds of the heaven have nests ; but the Son 
 of man hath not where to lay his head. And he said unto another, 
 Follow me. But he said, Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my fathei-. 
 But he said unto him, Leave the dead to bury their own dead : but go 
 thou and publish abroad the kingdom of God. And another also said, 
 I will follow thee, Lord ; but suffer me to first bid them farewell that 
 are at my house. But Jesus said unto him. No man, having put his 
 hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God ' 
 (Luke ix. 57-62). 
 
 Nor are these vague words. They are sustained to their 
 uttermost literal meaning by the life of the Lord. We are 
 
104 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM. 
 
 familiar with their purport ; alas ! so familiar that we can 
 hardly realise the startling emphasis with which they would 
 fall on the unaccustomed but eager ears, which were listening- 
 in those days to the word of Eternal Life. Men believed 
 profoundly that those words were spoken ou earth by the Lord 
 of everlasting glory, and they were taught by inspired lips 
 that His life was the Light of the world. Was it not most 
 natural, and indeed inevitable, that those on whom the power 
 of the higher life descended should take these words in what 
 seemed to be their simplest sense, and try what would come 
 of an honest endeavour to work them out as literally in 
 practice ? 
 
 The first Christian ascetics were like men dazzled by the 
 splendours of the invisible world that had burst suddenly 
 upon their sight. The higher and eternal interests of their 
 being seemed so transcendent that the present was eclipsed 
 and vanished. The world became a prison, and all that they 
 asked of earth was a lonely wilderness, wherein they might 
 feel themselves free to think only of heaven. They sought a 
 gymnasium for spiritual exercises. Just as the athletes sub- 
 mitted themselves to a special discipline that they might 
 contend successfully in the arena, so, they thought, the 
 •spiritual faculties needed to be drawn forth and strained to 
 their highest' tension by some special culture, which should be 
 C[uite other than, and apart from, the common duties and 
 burdens of life. 
 
 There is an important sense, surely, in which the ascetic 
 was right. We are here to train the highest part of us for 
 lofty service ; to detach it from its bondage to the world and 
 the flesh, and to stretch its powers to their full strain, by 
 exercising them constantly and strenuously in their appropriate 
 sphere. But that perfect school of discipline is just what 
 God has provided for us in the scene of our daily callings, 
 the world of our daily interests, and the home of our daily 
 
ROOT IDEA OF MONASTICISM. 105 
 
 loves. ' Our America is here,' in the body, in the world, ' or 
 nowhere.'^ Here the training of our highest faculties is to 
 be perfected, here the crown of our spiritual manhood is to 
 be won. The monastic idea had its root in a schism, schism 
 in that which God made one ; the noblest and completest 
 unity, the image of His own. Man is one. Not through an 
 interior schism of body, mind, and spirit, is man to attain to 
 his highest, but l^y an inner harmony, drawing his trinity 
 of powers into closer and holier union by their exercise in 
 the appointed field of human culture and work — the world. 
 
 Monachism, rooted in schism, had always a strangely divided 
 influence upon man. Noble strength and terrible weakness, 
 splendid achievement and disastrous failure, pure inspiration 
 and foul degradation, are curiously mingled in its history. 
 Its strength has always been that it is, on the whole, the 
 higher part in man which it has cultivated, and that it has 
 kept, on the whole, before the eyes of men in rough and 
 stormy centuries the purity, the self-denial, the love of nature 
 and of art, the intellectual culture, and the mercy and charity, 
 by which communities are blessed and saved. Its essential 
 vice has been that it is an artificial state, and that which is 
 unnatural and out of harmony with the being of man, never 
 fails to bring after it in the long run a retribution, which 
 proves in the end that God's law in the ordering of human 
 life is right. 
 
 The root of the monastic institution was this notion of 
 an aa-Kij(Ti9, the idea that the soul, as well as the body, needed 
 some special gymnastic culture and discipline. In the earlier 
 days of the institution this discipline was carried on in con- 
 nection with the ordinary scenes and activities of life. But 
 after a while, partly through the growing sadness and degra- 
 dation of secular society, but chiefly, we may be sure, througli 
 the growing fascination of the career itself, the ascetic as- 
 ' WUhelm M(-lsici\ Bk. VII. ch. .S. 
 
106 THK MONASTIC SYSTEM. 
 
 pirauts found that they could not bear the presence of their 
 fellow men, and betook themselves to remote places, the wilder 
 the better, where they could more freely carry on what they 
 mistook for the culture of their souls. The ascetic then 
 became an Anchorite, one who retreats from the world, or 
 an Eremite, one who lives in the desert, and there, far from 
 the sobering influence of his fellows, he gave himself up to 
 austerities and subtleties of self-torment which fill us alter- 
 nately with amazement, pity and disgust. There were wide 
 districts of the East, especially the Egyptian and Syrian 
 deserts, which in the fourth century literally swarmed with 
 hermits. They burrowed in the hill-sides, like rabbits in a 
 warren, and studiously lowered the pitch of their lives, as 
 far as food and shelter were concerned, to the level of the 
 brutes. 
 
 The next step in the development of the monastic system 
 was the association of these isolated anchorites in communities, 
 for the purposes of fellowship and strength. How the tran- 
 sition was accomplished it is not easy to trace. Much, no 
 doubt, was due to the influence of powerful and celebrated 
 men like Anthony and Pachomius, who drew, by the magnet 
 of their attraction, crowds of anchorites to their neighbour- 
 hood over whom it became necessary to establish some kind 
 i)f rule. The need of organisation had become imperative. 
 That ascetic spirit which had been floating in a vaporous 
 form about the Oriental Chxirch, must condense, take shape, 
 and enter the congress of life. The Eremites became Coeno- 
 bites, men living in common, under a common rule, with a 
 common head ; and then the de^'elopment of the monastic 
 institution fairly began. The organisation of the scattered 
 solitaries was attended by an immense increase of numbers. 
 We may accept Jerome's authority for the vast concourse 
 which attended a congregation of an order in the fifth cen- 
 tury, without trusting too implicitly to the numeration of 
 
ORIENTAL ASCETICISM. 107 
 
 even so distinguished a father of the Church. In truth, a 
 competent judge of numbers on a great scale is rare even at 
 the present day. But there were enough of them swarming 
 about the deserts and established about the cities of Egypt, 
 to revive in another form the ancient sneer, that in Egypt 
 it was far easier to meet with a god than with a man. 
 
 In judging of this Oriental asceticism we must take account 
 of the manners and habits of the Eastern peoples, and of 
 their climate which renders shelter and any but the simplest 
 food needless ; we must remind ourselves of the kind of 
 world from which the monks came out, and must recognise 
 the fact that these fanatics did really have heavenly aspira- 
 tions, and that they did honestly desire to live a spiritual 
 life detached from all earthly trammels, and masters of ap- 
 petite, affection and lust. However amply we may recognise 
 these special features of the position, it seems hard to speak 
 of Eastern monachism with the respect that so powerful and 
 popular an institution deserves. The Oriental monks appear, 
 as a class, to have been filthy and prurient. Constantly 
 fighting against a certain class of temptations, they kept them 
 constantly and eugrossingly before their sight. Save in one 
 respect, as we shall presently see, they ministered but little 
 to the culture and progress of mankind. Simeon Stjdites, 
 facile princcps of Oriental ascetics, on his single pillar where 
 he hved for 37 years and where he finally died, is no 
 lovely figure — spending as he did his days in countless pro- 
 strations, and lifting himself, as he said, every few years 
 nearer to heaven — by raising the height of his pillar I 
 
 It is true there is no lack of ilowers of rare and ex- 
 quisite grace scattered over this monkish waste. Touches of 
 beautiful affection, acts of heroic courage and constancy, 
 begem what were else a dismal history. The monks of the 
 Thebaid were, at any rate, not afraid of the worst wliich 
 the world could intlict on them. Athanasius found in them 
 
108 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM. 
 
 the most constant and courageoiis champions of the truth of 
 the Incarnation; and it was mainly by their help that he 
 won the greatest and most pregnant of doctrinal victories. 
 
 Still, on the whole, it is a dark, sad history. 
 
 The asceticism of the Eastern Church is distinctly in- 
 human; the taint of manichseism runs through it and poisons 
 its springs ; a hitter hatred to the body, as the organ of the 
 flesh, was its ruling principle, and it tended to gross and 
 foolish excesses, helpful neither to earth nor to heaven. 
 Before, howevei', we leave it to study the far nobler monach- 
 ism of the West, which mingled itself in very vital contact 
 with the development of the secular society by which it 
 was surrounded, we must in fairness pause to weigh one 
 consideration, which may tell in favour of even this com- 
 paratively low form of the religious life. 
 
 Look, for example, more narrowly for a moment at this 
 very Simeon Stylites. As matter of fact Iris age did rever- 
 ence him profoundly, and he wielded a very powerful in- 
 fluence over men. Very foolish of the age to be influenced 
 by such extravagant absurdities, we may say. Most surely, 
 very foolish, it might have kept its reverence for nobler 
 things. Perhaps the repul^lican enthusiasm for the rant of 
 the demagogue, and the evangelical worship of the popular 
 preacher are parallel absurdities in ours. If, however, we 
 are to understand history we must take each age as we find 
 it, and study with respect and sympathy those elements in 
 it which were found at the time to be of power. We may 
 be sure that if any great movement seems to us to be 
 absurd or extravagant, those who come after us will find 
 much that may be called by the same names in the doings 
 of our own days. 
 
 Here, in this Oriental asceticism, we see rising in the 
 world a new kind of power, at which it is worth one's 
 while to look a little closely. This Simeon, by his austerities 
 
THE MO^'AOHISM OF THE WEST. 109 
 
 and his constaut coiiteiiiplatiou of the unseen, won such in- 
 fluence in the world that multitudes flocked around his 
 pillar, and bishops, archbishops, even emperors, listened to 
 his words with reverence, as if to a special organ of the 
 voice of God. The life which he lived would not have been 
 possible for any man unless sustained by intense conviction ; 
 and that life manifested at any rate remarkable power of 
 self-denial, shaming by its simplicity and purity the world's 
 glaring ■s'ices, gluttony, dishonesty, and lust. Pantastic as it 
 was, it occupied itself evidently with unseen eternal things, 
 and in this way did actually brmg down to earth influence 
 out of the invisible world. The power which these ascetics 
 were winning was one before which the forces of the world 
 trembled ; in some way or another, men in a lonely wilder- 
 ness had won an authority before which monarchs quivered 
 on their thrones. These men were absolutely incorruptible 
 in an age when every one had his price, and though they 
 constantly erred in their judgments, they had respect in 
 these judgments — everybody knew it — to truth and righteous- 
 ness. They made their influence felt on the side of mercy, 
 gentleness, and charity ; they were always against the op- 
 pressor and on the side of the poor. 
 
 Here then was a new power, which, when organised and 
 developed in the more rational and manly West, had in it 
 the germs of a very lofty and potent influence on the develop- 
 ment of society. In the East, however, it was soon, like the 
 East itself, exhausted and doomed to decay. Self-enfolded 
 nothing can live. And age by age this Eastern monachism 
 "Tew more boneless and bloodless : and now probably the 
 dullest and dirtiest sloths that are slinking about Christendom, 
 are these monks of the Eastern Church. 
 
 The monachism of the West looked out of itself and lived. 
 There is a clear, bold, working aspect about it from the first. 
 
110 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM. 
 
 We may best express the diverse characteristics of the two 
 systems by observing that, war with the body out of hatred 
 and revenge was the key to Oriental asceticism ; war with 
 the body for the sake of its subjugation and use, was the key 
 to the monachism of the West. The monasticism of the 
 extravagant and unsavoury monks of the Thebaid, though not 
 without grand and noble passages, was one thing ; the monas- 
 ticism of the rule of St. Benedict among the vigorous, laborious, 
 and pirogressive Western peoples was another. Eastern 
 Christianity died with its monachism, perhaps died of it ; 
 Western Christianity lived through its ascetism, perhaps 
 lived by it ; and it has laid up in the inner cells of its life 
 that vital force which will one day restore the mother lands of 
 the Gospel to the visible kingdom of the Lord. 
 
 How the system got introduced into the Western empire, 
 and how it grew in its infancy we know not. Possibly the 
 great Athanasius brought it to Eome. The monks were his 
 fearless and devoted supporters, and he was at Eome in a.d. 
 340, with some monks in his train. All great things, how- 
 ever, spring, like the com, ' man knoweth not how,' and only 
 as it grew did it reveal its wonderful power. It is highly 
 characteristic of the practical and sober genius of the West, 
 especially of Eome in her imperial days, Ijoth pagan and Papal, 
 that at first it was received with hostility. At the funeral of 
 Blesilla, a young Eoman nun, supposed to have died of exces- 
 sive fasting, the Eoman populace was for throwing ' these 
 detestable monks ' into the river, ilonachism needed to be 
 bapitised with a new spirit before it could root itself deeply in 
 the West. But from the first it was noted that in the West 
 communion was the leading idea, not isolation. Xo doubt here 
 also, as in the East, the hermit's cell was the core of the 
 institution, but in the West the tendency was markedly 
 towards organisation ; and even before the time of Benedict, 
 the leading Western monasteries, especially in the south of 
 
BENEDICT OF NUKNIA. Ill 
 
 France, were exercising a very powerful influence on the 
 culture and life of their times. They were opposed to over- 
 rigid fasting, and recognised that in the hardier climates of the 
 North-west men need more food than in the sunny South. 
 ' Much eating,' they said, ' is gormandising among the Greeks, 
 but natural among the Gauls.' The truth is that fasting is 
 absolutely useless and senseless, except in so far as it clears 
 the brain and heart for their higher work. Some men it 
 invigorates, others it sickens and depresses. Let each study 
 honestly the habit of his own nature, and observe the discipline 
 which is best for his intellectual and spiritual powers. There 
 is no doubt, however, that in the Middle Ages people ate 
 enormously too much, and let us thank the monk who 
 reminded his age how little a man could live upon, and who 
 did something thereby to form the hal)it of moderation which 
 on the whole reigns benignly in these modern days. 
 
 Until the beginning of the sixth century the monasteries of 
 the West were isolated, and each did what was right in its own 
 eyes. Not a few grew rich and wanton, and the danger was 
 that in the general decay of everything in the empire, in the 
 dark days which were at once the deathbed of the Eoman and 
 the cradle of the modern world, the monastic institution would 
 be swept away with the wreck. Then arose Benedict of 
 iSTursia (c. 480 — c. 542), and by his celebrated rule settled the 
 character of Western monachism for ail time. Like other 
 great leaders he had the eye to see the special character of 
 the facts with which he set himself to deal. He gave a per- 
 manent form to what was already the instinctive tendency of 
 the monachism of the West ; he interpreted to itself the 
 spirit which was abroad in society around him, and gave it 
 wider and freer range. 
 
 Benedict was born of a noble family at Nursia, a descendant 
 of the Anician house, and early devoted himself to the solitary 
 life in its austerest form, at Subiaco, in the Eoman Campagna. 
 
 o 
 
112 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM. 
 
 There he acquired iiiimeiise intliience ; was chosen abbot of a 
 monaf3tery; attempted a reformation; was nearly poisoned, and 
 fled liack to his solitude. Men gathered rapidly around him ; 
 12 monasteries of 12 monks each were founded near his 
 ca\-ern ; again he was in peril from poison, and agaiir, after 
 thirty-five years at Subiaco, he took up his pilgrim-staff to 
 depart. He now settled himself at Monte Cassino, near the 
 head waters of the Liris, amid scenes of singular and gloomy 
 grandeur, and there he founded the monastery which was 
 destined to be a mighty factor in the development of the 
 Christian world. There he thought out and published the 
 celebrated rule which bears his name, which simply crystal- 
 lised into clear form and order the ideas which were floating 
 in the powerful and practical minds of the founders of 
 monachism in the West. For powerful they were, as well as 
 practical. We do not need il. de Montalembert's brilliant 
 rhetoric to teach us that the cloister was, on the whole, no 
 shelter for the weaklings of society, men easily dashed and 
 bruised by the rough world around them, and safer in a cell 
 than in a battle-field or on a throne. The great monks bear 
 full comparison with the greatest soldiers, statesmen, and 
 kings. We luay lament or condemn the form of life which 
 they elected, and see clearly whitherward it tends. But we 
 must bear in mind that it was for ages the chosen field of 
 action of some of the very strongest, ablest men, and the 
 noblest, purest women whom God sent forth into the world, 
 and we may Ije sure that a high and noble inspiration was at 
 the heart of a mo\'ement which occupied such splendid 
 energies, and left such marks on the higher development of 
 mankind. There can be no doubt that the rule included a 
 vast crowd of weak, dreamy faineant devotees ; but, on the 
 other hand, it would be hard to find, in any other sphere of 
 human activity during the Middle Ages, a grander company of 
 clear, strong, firm, and far-sighted men. We are bound to 
 
THE BENEDICTINE RULE. 113 
 
 believe in this life as one which had a specific Tightness of 
 adaptation in its times, or its secret will remain veiled. 
 
 Benedict drew up and promulgated a rule of monastic 
 living, which may be regarded as the complete expression 
 of the Western mind with respect to the nature and the 
 aims of the religious life, for it met with immediate and 
 almost universal acceptance, and has dominated the mon- 
 astic world for 1300 years. The rule spread with marvellous 
 rapidity through Europe. Placidus carried it to Sicily, 
 Maurus to France, Augustine probably to England ; and 
 towards the close of the eighth century it was so general 
 as to cause Charlemagne to inquire whether any other rule 
 existed throughout the vast dominions which he had subjected 
 to his sway. 
 
 It is well known to the most casual students of monastic 
 history that the three foremost ideas in the rule are self- 
 abnegation, obedience, and labour. Perhaps, next to the 
 novitiate, which will be touched on presently, the great 
 distinctive feature of the Benedictine as compared with the 
 Oriental rules, is the importance attached to manual and 
 agricultural labour. Incidentally this became a matter of 
 large importance to Europe, and it reveals the clear, practical 
 direction of the institution from the first. Not that it was 
 a new thing in monastic history. Even the most self-enfolded 
 of the Oriental monies had some notion of a duty to scratch 
 the ground about his cell, and raise the herbs he needed 
 for his food — that is, if he was so far from the Oriental 
 idea of perfection as to prefer salads to grass. But it never 
 assumed in the Eastern system anything like the dignity 
 and importance which from the first it attained to in the 
 West. 
 
 St. Benedict and his followers went to work with the axe and 
 spade, and cleared the wilderness where they were resolved 
 to settle. Order, culture, fertility, the land smiling under 
 
114 THK MONASTIC SYSTEM. 
 
 tillage, the wilderness and the solitary place made glad, 
 the desert rejoicing and blooming as the rose — these were 
 the fruits of the institution which delighted them ; the out- 
 ward and visible symbols of the inner culture, the clearing 
 of the moral wilderness, and the rearing of the flowers of 
 patience, hope and charity on the bosom of the desert within. 
 The following is a passage on labour from the rule of St. 
 Benedict : — 
 
 'Laziness is the enemy of the soul, and consequently the brothers 
 should, at fixed times, occupy themselves in manual labour ; at other times, 
 in holy reading. We think that these should be thus regulated. From 
 Easter to the month of October, after the first prime, they should work, 
 nearly to the fourth hour, at whatever may be necessary : from the 
 fourth hour, about to the sixth, they shall apply themselves to reading. 
 After the sixth hour, on leaving the table, they shall repose quietly 
 in their beds ; or if any one wishes to read, let him read, but in such 
 a manner as not to disturb others : and let nones be said at the middle 
 of the eighth hour. Let them work till vesjjers at whatever there may 
 be to do ; and if the poverty of the place, necessity, or the harvest keep 
 them constantly employed, let them not mind that, for they are truly 
 monks if they live by manual labour, as our fathers and the Apostles did ; 
 but let everything be done with moderation, for the sake of the weak.' ^ 
 
 The proportion here ordained is about two or three hours 
 for reading, and seven for manual labour. And at a time 
 when a great part of the culture of the Eoman world was 
 carried on by slaves, this rule of St. Benedict was the re- 
 surrection of industry, free industry, for the want of which 
 mainly the Empire was dying, nay, was dead. ' Latiftindia 
 pcrdidere Italiam,' said one well able to judge.^ Great farms, 
 cultivated by slaves, while their wealthy owners rioted in 
 luxury in the city, ruined the Empire ; and would have ruined 
 humanity but that monk and barbarian, German barbarian, 
 wroitght together to save it. Wrought together. Great 
 forces never work alone. While the monk was restoring 
 labour to its Divine dignity — ' My Father worketh hitherto, 
 and I also work ' — German freemen were pouring into the 
 1 Reg. S. Benedicti, ^. 48. '' Plin. Hist. Nat. XVIII. 7. 
 
DEBT OP AGRICULTURE TO THE MONKS. 115 
 
 Empire, and seizing all its most fruitful provinces, to make 
 them homes of industry once more. The concLuering bar- 
 barians became the free cultivators of the fair fields of Britain, 
 Gaul, and Italy, and the land broke forth into singing under 
 the tillage of their sinewy hands. 
 
 The monks of St. Benedict had begim the restoration 
 v?ithin the bosom of the Empire ; and they still continued 
 in the Teutonic era to render to agriculture a service which 
 is too little recognised, and which made their rule as helpful 
 to the industry of the German, as it had been to the Eoman 
 world. They constantly brought lands into cultivation which 
 nothing but pious labour could have reclaimed and .subdued. 
 
 We wander among the graceful and splendid ruins of the 
 great Benedictine and Cistercian houses, with which in time 
 our country and Europe generally were begemmed ; and we 
 are prone to indulge in a sarcastic reflection on the keen 
 appreciation of natural charms which the choice of the 
 sites exhibits. The taunt is .somewhat thread-bare, but we 
 meet with it still even among those who ought to know 
 the truth. Tintern, Bolton, Fountains, and Melrose, are 
 familiar names to most of us. They are the fairest scenes 
 even in this fair land. The great abbeys abroad occupy 
 mainly kindred sites. They seem to claim the softest valleys, 
 the greenest pastures, the most fruitful hill slopes, the most 
 teeming rivers, as their own. These gardens of Europe are 
 the monastic eulogies. Fountains Abbey stands in a York- 
 shire valley, of which one is tempted to complain that it 
 is too exquisite, too suggestive of luxurious plenty, security, 
 and repose. But turn to the picture which the valley 
 presented to the first monks who invaded it, in search of 
 a dreary wilderness, where they might be .sure of finding 
 hardship, hunger and toil. They came out from the rich 
 abbey of St. Mary's at York to live a simpler and purer 
 life, and they settled in the valley where in time they 
 
116 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM. 
 
 reared their splendid fane, because they found there a 
 dismal marsh and a thick forest, with no clearing big enough 
 to grow them even a few sheaves of corn. Half their 
 number died in the first winter from famine and marsh 
 fever ; the rest held on, and the result of their pious labour 
 we enjoy to-day. 
 
 If we search the records of the settlement of Benedict 
 at Subiaco or Monte Cassino ; of Columbanus at Luxeuil 
 or Bobbio ; of his chief disciple at St. Gall ; of Abelard at 
 the Paraclete, and Bernard at Clairvaulx, we find substanti- 
 ally the same history. These scenes which seem so fit to 
 be the homes of a soft and indolent quietude, were chosen 
 because of their wild and desolate sternness ; and they were 
 tamed to their x^resent beauty by the strenuous toU of 
 husbandmen, the like of whom no other history reveals. 
 These men believed that each fen which they drained, each 
 copse which they cleared, each acre which they brought 
 under the ploughshare, was an acceptable offering of pious 
 hands and hearts to God. At least this belief animated 
 the leaders ; the mass of the followers at any rate caught 
 the habit, and to catch a good habit is something for the 
 gxeat mass of men in such a world as this. It would Ije 
 idle, of course, to contend that this was the constant char- 
 acter of monastic labour throughout the Middle Ages. 
 Monasteries grew fearfully rich, and, like the secular lords 
 around them, cultivated vast estates by the labour of a 
 peasantry bound to the soil. But the primal motif never 
 wholly failed them ; agriculture was always a main concern 
 with the great religious communities ; and the quasi-conse- 
 cration of all that belonged to them secured for their lands 
 some share of immunity from the horrors and devastations 
 of war ; though the protection was more imperfect than is 
 generally supposed. Something of the noble motive to 
 labour which inspired the first founders, continued to animate 
 
EKNKliUTlNE OBEDIENCE. 117 
 
 tlieir relation to tlioir labourors ami depeiulents, and a long 
 book wonld be needotl fully to set forth the debt whieh 
 K\iropean agricultni-o owes to the monks of the Middle Age. 
 
 In eonneetion with the seli'-abnogation and obedience 
 demanded by tlie r>enedietine rule, it is to be noted that 
 the founder introduced a most import^int feature — the per- 
 petuity of the vow. Before his time the monastic vow had 
 remained under the control of the man who made it. He 
 was simply a layman who chose to do certain things, and 
 when he was tired he might depart and do what else he 
 pleased. St. Renedict established the perpetuity of the 
 vow under the mo«t solenm and awful obligations, while at 
 the same time he provided a long aaid severe novitiate. 
 Here is the ordinance about the vow : — 
 
 ' Let hiiu who is to he received promise in tlie oratoi'v before trod 
 iiml His sniiits the pevpetuitv of his stav, the refonuatioii of his 
 maimers, luid obedieiiee. . . . Let a deed be made of this promise in the 
 name of the saints whose relies are deposited there, and in presence 
 i>f the Abbot. Let him write this deed with his own band, or, if lie 
 eaiinot write, let anotlier at his veqnest, write it for him, and let the 
 noviee pot a cross to it^ and with his own hand deposit the deed npon 
 the altar.' > 
 
 From r>enedict's time ' Once a monk, always a monk,' 
 became the law ; and it is easy to see how immensely 
 tliis perpetuity of the vow increased the p^iwer of the system 
 as an influence on European society. The novice being 
 received at lengtli and with difficulty into the brotherhood, 
 made it his supreme concern to ot!er up, in every possible 
 form, the sacrihee of himself How absolute was this self- 
 abnegation, this suicide of tlie will, appears in nmny passages 
 of the l\nle. Here is one forbidding tlie possession of indi- 
 vidual property : — 
 
 ■ It is especially necessjivv to extiipatc fivni the monastery, and niito 
 the verv root, the vice of an_\ one daring to give or receive anything 
 
 ' Rdi. S. Btii,;licli, c. ,"iS. 
 
118 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM. 
 
 without the order of the Abbot, uor may he Lave aiiythiug of lii.s 
 ow]i peculiar property, not a book, nor tablets, nor a pen, nor anything 
 whatsoever ; for it is not permitted them even to have their body 
 and their will under their own power.' ' 
 
 The obedience which the monk was to reiidei- to his aljbot 
 was of the most abject and unquestioning kind. It was 
 pure, passive, lifeless obedience, yet we have to remember 
 that it was by an act of high and deliberate volition, 
 under circumstances that secured its perfect freedom, that 
 the man made himself a slave. When the choice was once 
 made, slave was the title he ,c;loried in, and servile punish- 
 ments for breaches of rule were willingly and even joyfully 
 endured. Nothing can be more suicidal in the long run 
 than this idea of self-surrender, but it is important to 
 understand liow earnestly Benedict sought to secure that it 
 should be voluntary. He balanced the demand for absolute 
 obedience by the length and the careful training of the 
 novitiate. 
 
 So extraordinary is this feature of unreasoning self-sur- 
 render on the part of the monastic votarj', that inquiry has 
 naturally been made into the question of its origin. Here 
 is the view of M. Guizot : — 
 
 ' Together with labour St. Bernard preMcribes passive obedience of 
 the monks to their superiors : a rule less new, and which prevailed 
 also among the monks of the East, but which he laid down in a 
 much more express manner, and more vigorously developing its conse- 
 quences. It is inipo.ssitile, in studying the history of European civih'Ka- 
 tion, not to be astonished at the part which is there played by this idea, 
 and not curiously to seek its origin. Of a surety, Europje i-eceived it 
 neither from Greece, Ancient Rome, the Germans, nor from C'hi istianity, 
 properly so called. It began to appear under the Roman Enipiie, ;ind 
 arose out of the worship of the Imperial majesty.'^ 
 
 A deeper source may however Ije found for the feeling 
 which made this self-abnegation possible, if we connect it 
 
 1 /.V3. S. Bmedkii, u. .3.3. 
 
 -Tinizot, HtHfory of <'ii:iH«alHjii, Eng. Trans., II. 77. 
 
CRITICISM OF THE RULE. 119 
 
 with the same enthusiastic personal devotion to the Lord, 
 which, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, goes 
 far to explain the monastic life at large. The abbot was 
 to the monk as Christ. It is to this root that the sub- 
 mission must be referred, rather than to the servile habits 
 of Imperial Eome. That entire obedience to the Father's 
 will, which is so conspicuous a feature in the life and dis- 
 courses of the Lord, the monks dehtihted to imitate in their 
 submission to the man whom Christ had set over them — 
 who was to them as a present God. Men pined, amidst 
 the confusion and darkness of their intellectual sphere, in 
 an age when the constructive instinct was strong, for visible 
 tangible manifestations of unseen spiritual powers. The 
 Abbot was this to the monk, the Pope became this to the 
 Catholic world. In both spheres the submission was abject 
 and destructive ; though ennobled fur a time by the vision 
 of some more awful form behind both Abbot and Pope. 
 But it was simply idolatrou-s — the endeavour to grasp 
 within some form which could come within the cognisance 
 of the understanding, the substance of the unseen but ever- 
 present Lord. Self-denial is one thing. A man may deny 
 himself in the free exercise of his loftiest faculty, and 
 realise an inner freedom of the personal wUl and fulness 
 of personal life in the effort. But the real aim of the 
 monastic discipline was to leave a man no self to deny. 
 There was its essential weakness. The Buddhist is the 
 only monk who grasps the whole meaning of the iustitution, 
 and dares to set clearly before himself the idea which is 
 behind every high form of the ascetic life. It is a per- 
 petual draining of the springs of the personal being ; it 
 strikes a death-blow at that which makes man worth 
 redeeming, in the hope of making his redemption more com- 
 plete. Could it have run its course unchecked, unmastered 
 by other and yet higher human forces, it would have killed 
 
120 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM. 
 
 at the very root the development of society, by leaving 
 for development nothing but machines. 
 
 Having glanced thus at some of the main features in the 
 Benedictine rule, we may now take a rapid survey of the 
 whole field of mediseval monachism, by considering : — 
 
 I. The part which the monks played in relation to the 
 visible body, the Church. 
 
 II. Their relation to the inward and outward life of men — 
 the human affections, interests, and duties. 
 
 III. The service which they rendered incidentally to the 
 culture of Christendom, and the unfolding of the life of secular 
 society. 
 
 I. In regard to the relation of the monastic communities to 
 the Church at large, we must note that the monks at first 
 were simply laymen. The process by which, almost in spite 
 of themselves, they became not clerics only, but the elect of 
 the clerical order, it may be interesting briefly to trace. 
 Primarily the monastic instinct tended to seclusion from the 
 world, and from all offices of natural, political, or ecclesiastical 
 duty. For many generations the monks, as a class, retained 
 their lay character ; and the most earnest of them kept them- 
 selves rigidly aloof from the offices and services of the Church. 
 They were, in fact, taught to put on the same level the call to 
 ministerial duty and the temptations of the flesh. The warning 
 is conveyed in a curious passage from Cassian : — 
 
 ' It is the ancient advice of the fathers, advice which endnres, . . that 
 a monk at any cost must iiy bishops and women : for neither women nor 
 bishops allow a monk who has once become familiar with them, to rest in 
 peace in his cell, nor to fix his eyes on pure and celestial doctrine, con- 
 templating holy things.' ^ 
 
 The ascetic would, indeed, be likely to hold himself superior 
 to ordinances of all sorts. He worshipped in an inner 
 
 1 De. Of-enoh. Imtit., XI. 17. 
 
THE MONKS AND THE CHURCH. 121 
 
 sanctuary, and his priesthood refused the imposition of earthly- 
 hands. To him, Church officers and offices would appear in 
 the light of worldly tempters and distractions, drawing him 
 away from the rapt contemplation of things spiritual and 
 divine. Still, from the first, complications, sometimes of a 
 serious kind, arose. Monks of a certain class, covetous of 
 power, pressed into the priesthood, and able monks were 
 coveted and sometimes caught with guile by scheming 
 bishops, and of this curious tales may be read in the litera- 
 ture of the times. On the whole, the lay character was for 
 a while successfully maintained, though it was a hard matter 
 to escape the bishop's crook, which tended terribly to laecome 
 a claw. 
 
 The fifth century was an age in which the episcopal order 
 consolidated and extended its power. The records of that 
 epoch are full of legislation which had for its direct object 
 the subjection of the monks, both in the establishment and 
 the conduct of their monasteries, to episcopal control. Mona- 
 chism was at that time establishing itself in the West with 
 little method or uniformity, and naturally, having no 2^o'>-'f>'i 
 d'appui, the monks in the various districts fell under episcopal 
 sway. But as they became organised as Benedictines, and 
 increased in influence, power and wealth, the monks bore 
 with growing impatience the supervision of an ofificial whose 
 grade in holiness they regarded as lower than their own. 
 Material considerations, too, soon complicated the matter. 
 The monasteries gathered treasure ; the bishops of the fifth, 
 sixth and seventh centuries were greedy of reveniie for their 
 sees. The monks, as the ecclesiastical legislation amply 
 proves, suffered grievous spoliation, and even violence at 
 their hands. The parochial clergy had already utterly 
 lost their independence, amd were held in servile, and often 
 bnital subjection. But the monks fought hard for freedom. 
 They had a standing ground of their own, which tlie clergy 
 
122 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM. 
 
 lacked, and thej' offered an organised and sometimes armed 
 resistance. The struggle lasted with more or less ^■ehemence 
 through three eentaries, and terminated at last in favour of 
 the monks, by the intervention of the Papal See, from which 
 in those ages man}- deliverances sprang. 
 
 "\Miile the monks were battling with the bishops for inde- 
 pendence, a great change was passing over their relations 
 to the Church. As they felt their power, honour, and 
 authority increase, they lost something of the primal ascetic 
 inspiration, and began to aspire to ofhcial functions. The 
 way would be opened by practical demands which would 
 constantly make themselves felt. A numerous company of 
 monks, settled at a distance from the church where the 
 ordinances and sacraments were celebrated, would be in 
 some perplexity : partly from distance, and partly from the 
 feeling of superiority to the common mass of the faithful, 
 they would strive to get what came to be called a chapel 
 consecrated in their monastery, in which, at intervals, a priest 
 might officiate. But this intrusion of a ghostly man, of an 
 inferior order of ghostliness, would cause some soreness in 
 the monastery, especially as the jealousy between the clergy 
 and the monks increased. Then they would naturally seek 
 to have one of their own order consecrated as their priest, 
 to minister to them in holy things. And thus it actually 
 befell. But this would introduce a distinction, an inequality 
 where equality was fundamental : and so it came about that 
 the whole body of the monks began to aspire to the clerical 
 office, and gradually, by the force of the vii-tues wliich, what- 
 ever we may think of them, were most honoured in those times, 
 they made their way into the front rank of the ministers of 
 the Church. It is impossible to fix the dates of the variotis 
 steps of the transition. Early in the seventh century, Boniface 
 IV. proclaimed them. 2?lv.s qiiajn ido7ici, 'more than fit' for the 
 clerical office, aud from that time we may regard them as on 
 
THE WORK OF BONIFACE. 123 
 
 the high way to supreme clerical power, which they finally 
 achieved by the sheer weight of their intellectual and spiritual 
 superiority to the priesthood, in those points which struck the 
 imagination of that rough but idolatrous age. 
 
 A notable era in the development of Western monachism is 
 marked by the career of Boniface (c. 685-754), the great Anglo- 
 Saxon missionary to Germany, and one of the ablest and most 
 far-sighted statesmen of the eighth century. He had the eye 
 to discern and comprehend the bearings of two rising powers 
 which were destined to play a prominent part in European 
 history. He saw that the true cure for the miseries of the 
 ]\Ierovingian kingdom was the assumption of the regal power 
 by Pepin, the founder of the Carolingian Empire, and he 
 attached himself with zeal to the fortunes of that powerful 
 family. At the same time he saw that a principle of order, 
 not of the purest or most perfect kind — Boniface knew that 
 full sadly — but still powerful, practical, and full of promise for 
 the future, was to be found in the extension of the dominion of 
 the Papal See ; and he lent the whole weight of his remark- 
 able character and influence to strengthen and enlarge the 
 rising authority of the Popes, which had still in it some 
 original spiritual force and life. It was in devout submission 
 to Ifome that he carried on his missionary labours ; the 
 bishoprics which he founded, after the fashion of his own 
 see of Mainz, were placed solemnly under Papal control, and 
 it was as the representative of Pope Zachary that he anointed 
 Pepin king. In fact, Boniface was the leading statesman in 
 Northern Europe during the whole of that era of transition, 
 and the institutions which he mainly helped to found were 
 destined to a mighty success. 
 
 The career of Boniface had in many remarkable ways a 
 powerful influence on monasticism, as his copious correspond- 
 ence reveals, and in founding the monastery of Fulda in 744 
 he placed it directly under Papal protection. Thenceforth 
 
124 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM. 
 
 the monks began to see in the Papacy the power which 
 would uphold them against the tyranny both of the bishops 
 and of the secular lords. From that time the monks and 
 the Eoman See begin to draw together in closer relations, 
 and in the end the whole army of the monks, during the 
 palmy days of the institution, became the army of the Papal 
 Church. 
 
 Without the monks the work of the Church would 
 probably have been impossible. Por good or for evil .they 
 served her with singular fidelity, and were as a body her 
 devoted champions. Celibates — after the manner of all 
 standing armies — they were at the disposal of the Church, 
 to maintain her pretensions, to fight her battles, and to 
 carry out her plans. The extension to all the ^^fso^ie^ of 
 the Church of the monastic principle of celibacy threw 
 into her hands a power of enormous magnitude. It kept 
 the whole spiritual force of Christendom under one head, 
 and ready, as it were, at the single word of command. 
 TeiTilile as were the evils of Church pretensions and claims, 
 and of the wrongs and outrages perpetrated in the most 
 sacred Name, it was doubtless better for humanity at large 
 that the particular form of Christ's kingdom represented by 
 the mediteval Church should be wrought out to the fullest 
 possible perfection. The Church completed her organisation 
 by adopting the principle of the monastic orders, and could 
 always count on them for consistent and effective ser\'ice. 
 
 Hence it follows that our estimate of the value of the 
 influence of the monks in mediajval society will largely 
 depend on the value we attach to the influence of Eome. 
 A very noble idea was at the root of the devotion of the 
 monks to the Papal chair. It was in the conviction that 
 the Eoman See represented the unity of Christendom, that 
 they vowed themselves to its service ; they would realise 
 through Eome the visible kingdom of the Lord. 
 
THE UNITY OF CHRISTENDOM. 125 
 
 It must, however, be remembered that the idea of the 
 unity of Christendom took different forms in the early 
 Christian and mediteval centuries. We must not suppose 
 that the one form in which this unity presented itself 
 was the kind of theocracy that floated before the vision of 
 Gregory VII., Innocent III., or Boniface VIII. Church- 
 men were, indeed, slow to entertain the idea of a united 
 Christendom under the rule of a priest. That Christianity 
 was the World-Eeligion was a fixed idea, and the Eoniau 
 rule naturally suggested a World-Empire as its outward form. 
 At the conversion of Constantine a temporal jDi'ince had 
 actually stepped into the headship of the Church-State, 
 which was regarded as a kind of vicegerency of Christ in 
 the world. The position which Constantine assumed, and 
 which the Church continued to recognise — Gregory the Great 
 wrote to Maurice as to his master, and Leo bent before 
 Charlemagne as he crowned him at Eonie — made the 
 emperor the unquestioned head of Christendom. The con- 
 ception of a complete Christian State, a visible political 
 body of which the emperor under Christ should be the 
 head, and of which the Church should be the inspiring 
 soul — the conception of ' the Holy Eoman Empire ' — is 
 the key to the aim and effort of Christendom through much 
 of the medieval period. How passionately a great layman 
 could cling to this idea, the Be ifonarchid of Dante reveals, 
 and at one time the imperial power had no stronger sup- 
 port than the ablest minds of the Church. But the dream 
 was but a dream. Not in that form could a kingdom of 
 Christ be realised in the world. If we contrast Dante's 
 dream of the Empire with its history under all but the 
 ablest rulers — nay, under the ablest, for the splendid reign 
 of Frederick Barbarossa is among the saddest of all — we 
 shall see that the Empire, complicated as it was with 
 German politics, was palpably unequal to its mission, and 
 
126 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM. 
 
 that there was ample room for the pretensioDS of the purely 
 spiritual power to grow. 
 
 On the wreck, therefore, of the temporal unity of Christen- 
 <lom arose the idea of the imperial power of the Church. 
 The steps by which the Eoman See, aided by the monastic 
 institution, attained its supremacy we cannot even in outline 
 trace. A terrible history of usurpation, fraud and shameless 
 forgery may be gathered from the records of Cliurch history. 
 ' Janus ' parades them in one startling chapter, dealing too 
 tenderly with Niehola.s I., who laid the foundation on which 
 Hildebrand built the empire of the Church.^ But forgery 
 ■does not explain a power which was wielded Avith such 
 tremendous force for ages, and which j\I. Comte — who con- 
 siders that the positive philosophy, ' being as free from 
 monotheistic as from polytheistic or fetish belief,' is singu- 
 larly able to form a calm judgment — regards as 'formant 
 Jusquici Ic chef d'ce.uvrc poliiiqu-e dc la sagesse huvm-iiie.' 
 There must have been a great preparation in the public 
 mind of Europe for the usurpation ; there must have been 
 a sense that the advancing power would fill a vacant 
 throne, and restore a lapsed idea ; and this must be fairly 
 taken into the account, when we would estimate the pro- 
 cedure of the Papacy in these times. It is easy to detect a 
 steady growth of pretension and power, from the days when 
 Gregory the Great wrote humbly to ^Maurice and worse 
 than humbly to Phocas, to the day when Boniface VIII. 
 issued the bull, Aitscidta, fili ; or when seizing a sword he 
 declared, ' It is I who am C;esar ; it is I who am Emperor ; 
 it is I who win defend the rights of the Empire.' This 
 was however the first stage of the decline. "When the 
 -emissary of Philip le Bel struck the old man with his 
 mailed hand, he marked an era in the history of the 
 Church. Philip le Bel, one of tlie most unbeautiful figures 
 
 ' TTxe Pope and the Counn/, ch. ,S. 
 
FUNCTION OF THE CHURCH. 127 
 
 in history, was yet a national monarch with a nation 
 behind him ; and with the rise of the national spirit the 
 Papacy began to decay. The death of Eoniface was fol- 
 lowed speedily by the seventy years' Captivity ; then came 
 the councils of Constance and Basle, and then things ripened 
 rapidly for the Eeformation. 
 
 On the whole the growth of the institution up to the 
 fourteenth century was continuous and sure, but even in the 
 period of its highest power, as will be shown on a later 
 page, Christendom was at all times ready to turn from the 
 Papacy to any influence which seemed to present higher 
 claims to a Divine sanction. A man like St. Bernard, for 
 example, was, as we shall see, recognised as an authority 
 far beyond and above that of any occupant of the Papal 
 chair. 
 
 The Roman Church during the period of its supremacy 
 was just a rude battery of force, the main direction of which 
 was Christian, acting on a state of society too hard and 
 gross to be influenced by more subtle and spiritual means. 
 The Gospel, sheltered within this citadel, strove to stir the 
 sluggish spirit of the times, and to bear such witness as was 
 possible against the more crying evils that were desolating 
 society, and in favour of justice, temperance, and charity, as 
 graces still dear to God and blessed for man. One thing 
 the Church did accomplish, though at such a moral cost as 
 makes it difticult to strike the balance between loss and 
 »ain ; she wrought the facts and truths of Christianity into 
 the very texture of the intellectual, social and political life 
 of humanity, and impressed that Christian character on our 
 civilisation which is its distinguishing glory, and which, once 
 inwrought, abides for all time. On the whole, the things 
 which were of supreme importance were in the custody of 
 the Church, and despite Mr. Lecky's able argument, we must 
 conclude that though the ages of her sway were little fruitful 
 
]28 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM. 
 
 in the highest Christian sense, they were the parents of a 
 great future ; they were ages in which ideas and habits of 
 action were being worked into the very heart of European 
 society, which will Christianise humanity to the end of time. 
 The monastic orders, mighty helpers in this great work, share 
 fully in whatever glory or whatever shame attaches to the 
 rule of the Eoman Church throughout the Middle Age. 
 
 II. The relation of the monks to the inward and outward 
 life of men — to the human affections, interests and duties. 
 In this connection it will be sufficient to refer to the mission- 
 ary work of the monasteries, and to the influence on society 
 of the virtues they chiefly cultivated. 
 
 One great and unquestioned service rendered by the monk 
 to Christian society was in his capacity of missionary to the 
 Teutonic settlers, within the limits of the Empire and beyond, 
 who were destined to grow into the European nations of the 
 West. There was that in the monastic life, its simplicity, 
 its purity, its severe abstinence and contempt for pain and 
 death, which had a strong attraction for the imaginative but 
 somewhat brutal barbarians who settled within the Empire, 
 and for the still ruder tribes who dwelt beyond. To these 
 the monastic orders furnished, generation after generation, 
 the most courageous, devoted, and successful missionaries, 
 and their influence was enormous on the manners and morals 
 of the barbarian peoples. Their success in this work largely 
 depended on the fact that they were the only men who could 
 travel about Europe in safety. The old Pax Romana, which 
 had been an indispensable condition of the rapid spread of 
 Christianity, was broken up. The Empire had gone to wreck, 
 and a new cycle of storm and strife had opened, in which the 
 monks seemed, as it were, born -to be the ministering spirits. 
 
 The monastic profession made a kind of ark, where the 
 truth and power of Christianity could take shelter; and the 
 
SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF THE MONKS. 129 
 
 monks themselves , were the men who had the power and 
 courage to bear it through the world. The monk as a rule 
 was safe among the rudest barbarians and amid the shock 
 of war. He was as safe as a holy Christian woman is safe 
 in these days in visiting the haunts of impurity and crime, 
 and for the same reason. He could move where he would, 
 securely, and, moreover, he was everywhere at home. A 
 hut of boughs, a bit of bread, a spring of water — he had 
 all he wanted. He found, too, brethren to shelter and help 
 him. His monk's dress was a ready passport to every 
 monastic establishment, to every eremite's cell. Here was a 
 great brotherhood spread all over the European world, whose 
 watchwords were purity, abstinence and toil. The monks 
 did not live up to these watchwords (do we live up to 
 ours ?) but they tried their best ; — it was their ideal at which 
 they aimed. They were ever on the watch to support and 
 strengthen each other. They kept up a close intercourse by 
 letters ; they were brethren, corresponding as brethren though 
 subjects of hostile states, and the effect of this constant 
 effort of a widespread and powerful community in favour of 
 the Christian virtues was incalculable. England was one of 
 the countries in which in the seventh and eighth centuries 
 the monastic institution took the deepest root and exercised 
 the widest influence ; and the intercourse of the great con- 
 ventual establishments in England during the Heptarchy, 
 the unity of the monkish fraternity and of their regula- 
 tions and offices, did more than any one political move- 
 ment to consolidate the realm of England, and to make the 
 several States one Nation under Egbert's and our great Alfred's 
 hand. It may incidentally be noticed that many of our towns 
 in Western Europe grew up around the religious houses. A 
 very able and learned writer, who has studied the subject 
 deeply, estimated that three-eighths of the towns of France 
 
 owe their existence to monasteries. 
 
 I 
 
130 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM. 
 
 It may be asked, had not Europe to pay a terrible 
 price for the advantages she gained through the labours 
 of the monks ? Was not the principle underlying mona- 
 chism one that in its essence was really destructive of 
 social life ? Were not many of the dearest and most 
 sacred interests of society trampled in the dust by the 
 cehbate ? Could they have fully wrought out their will 
 would they not have made life a purgatory and the 
 world a waste ? There is this side of the question to be 
 looked at, and the truth which underlies the charge is 
 fatal to the monastic life as a permanent and universal 
 Christian institution, but by no means conclusive against 
 it as a thing of virtue and use in its ovs^n times. Looking 
 at the domestic affections, it is easy to pronounce stern 
 judgment on a system which wrought in tender hearts 
 such an unnatural hardness as we iind sometimes cultivated 
 under the ascetic rule. There are, however, some startling 
 words in the Gospels about a man ' hating father and 
 mother ' for the sake of Christ. We have seen that the 
 ascetic tried to lift himself into the sphere of Divine 
 experience, through a partial and often mistaken outward 
 imitation of the- Lord, and this may explain the attitude 
 of monachism towards this side of human nature. There 
 is however another point of view. It may fairly be 
 urged that some such isolation and sublimation of the 
 domestic affections was essential to the realisation, after 
 the struggles and self-mortifications of ages, of that purity, 
 delicacy and spiritual beauty, which in modern life lend a 
 holy charm to the perfection of wedded and kindred love. 
 In other words, so ensnaring, so debasing, had been, in the 
 ancient world, the influence of the flesh on the domestic and 
 social relations, that men under the overpowering attraction of 
 the new spiritual life felt compelled to cut themselves off 
 completely from this lower sphere. The separation, however. 
 
THE MONKS AND HUMAN AFFECTIONS. 131 
 
 was really preparatory to a lasting union — to that blending of 
 the spiritual life with the natural, which should redeem and 
 piirify those very affections that at one time it seemed to 
 oppose and threaten to destroy. Plato, too, had dreamed this 
 dream of the sublimation of all earthly relationships, and he, 
 too, like the monks, believed that it was the condition of a 
 heavenly rather than an earthly world. He says of his form of 
 the spiritual republic : ' 'AXX', . . . h ovpavM 'Ictcds wapdSeiyfjLa 
 avuKeLTai tu> ^ovXo/xevw opciv Koi opcovTi eavTOv KOTOiKi^eiv.' 
 The new power which had entered into the world with 
 Christianity had, like the Baptist, to draw itself off to 
 the desert, and nurse itself there, before it could enter the 
 circle of life, and rule the whole sphere as lord. And 
 ages are but as days in this great history. ¥ov ten cen- 
 turies the spiritual element in the Church, as far as man 
 could detach it, passed through this narrow, stern, but 
 intense discipline — there is eternity before humanity in 
 which to reap its fruit. 
 
 It is noteworthy, too, that, though monachism might 
 seem to bring a most potent battery to bear against every- 
 thing by which secular society could increase and prosper, 
 society yet increased and prospered mightily. One grand 
 feature of the social influence of the monks, to which 
 M. Comte does full justice in his critique on the Middle 
 Age, is the career which they opened to power of every 
 kind. ' Za carriire ouverfe aux talents,' was the gospel of 
 the Prench Eevolution, according to Mr. Carlyle. As 
 regards the secular sphere, he is quite right. But ' the 
 •career ' had always been open in the monastic. One of 
 the noblest features of our English society and one main 
 source of its stabilitj', is the access which is open to men 
 of high capacity, through the law and the legislature, to 
 the peerage and the highest offices of the State. What 
 that element of our life does for England, the monastic 
 
132 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM. 
 
 orders did for Europe diiring the formative ages of its 
 history. The religious profession was absolutely free to every 
 one ; prince and peasant were equal in the cell ; birth was 
 nothing, capacity was all. The poorest, if he had power, 
 might scale the highest throne in the world. And thus 
 there was, in an age when the caste organisation of society 
 was peculiarly hard and rigid, a constant ascent of fresh 
 blood and strong brain power from the lowest stratum to 
 the highest, whereby to an extent which is not always 
 appreciated by historians, a most powerful iniluence for 
 good was exercised over the great world's affairs. Again, 
 in an age of supreme monastic influence, even when the 
 greatest of monks wielded imperial power in Europe, 
 woman rose to a position of dignity, and developed a 
 power and beauty of character, which we cannot refuse to 
 connect largely with the elevating and purifying influence 
 of monastic life and thought, on the thought and the life 
 of society. The monks did more to help society upwards 
 by the spirit which they breathed, tlian to crush it down- 
 wards by the maxims which they promulgated. Their 
 theory would have destroyed the civilisation which they 
 themselves helped mightily to consolidate and raise. 
 
 Nothing, too, can be a greater mistake than to suppose 
 than this stern repression of the natural affections issued 
 necessarily in hardness and poverty of nature. Sternly as 
 they strove to indurate themselves quoad world and natural 
 affection, the monks often lived in their monasteries hves 
 full of human gentleness and tenderness, and in their 
 best days not without some pure gaiety and gladness of 
 heart. Simplicitas, hcnignitas, hilaritas, were no idle words 
 upon their hps. Some of the most tender and passionate 
 effusions which have come down to us from the records of 
 the past are contained in monastic chronicles and corre- 
 spondence. Though there is something sweet in those 
 
THE MONKS AND PATRIOTISM. 138 
 
 tender and apparently satisfying friendships of the cloister, 
 they are unnaturally strained and therefore in the long 
 run weakening; nor can it be doubted, that from that 
 side sore temptations pressed them, and a flood of evil at 
 length broke in. But the reason why this hardening 
 process did not harden, but left men with sensitive hearts 
 and vivid affections, is not far to seek. The love which 
 they denied their kindred was not wasted, they spent it 
 with passionate fervour on the Saints and on the Lord. 
 
 It has been said of Christianity that it is deficient in 
 stimulus to the patriotic virtues. It individualises men, 
 and places each one under such tremendous pressure, that 
 the State vanishes, the individual and his individual belong- 
 ings are all. "We have already seen, however, that before 
 the Advent this individualising process had been in full 
 play. The patriotic sentiment in Greece had been greatly 
 weakened by the cosmopolitan empire of Alexander. The 
 philosophical ideas both of Zeno and Epicurus, as we have 
 noted, are remarkable for the earnestness with which they 
 deal with individual interests, and let the grander range 
 of the elder philosophy pass out of sight. To bear up 
 the man against the ills of life was their main problem ; 
 and it stated itself yet more strongly in the stoical 
 philosophy of Eome. Christianity, cultivating the indi- 
 vidiial, and making him, at the same time, the conscious 
 citizen of a wider, even a celestial commonwealth, left him 
 to deal with his mundane duties in the new spirit which 
 it inspired. The result, as a matter of fact, was that the 
 mundane suffered at first some harm and loss. The monks 
 seemed to carry to an extreme the isolating tendency ; 
 country, kindred, were nothing to them ; but, on the 
 other hand, they acknowledged a spiritual brotherhood that 
 was all in all. The world was immensely richer for this 
 idea of spiritual fellowship, and as M. Ozanam points out 
 
134 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM. 
 
 and ;is we have already in another connection explained, 
 in the break-up of the Empire, this universal monastic 
 brotherhood was a strong ncms of society, and helped to 
 keep the unity of Christendom before the minds of men. 
 
 III. The service which the monks rendered incidentally 
 to the culture of Christendom, and the unfolding of the 
 life of secular society. 
 
 There is a preliminary question which forces itself here 
 on the attention, and which has been a good deal discussed 
 of late years. Did not Europe, it is asked, greatly suffer 
 from the withdrawal of such a vast array of capable men 
 from her fields of secular activity and toil ? It is a 
 question that had claimed an answer in an earlier age. 
 The Emperor Maurice found that the army was seriously 
 affected by the withdrawal of tliose who desired to devote 
 themselves to religion. He was for taking strong stepn to 
 check it. Gregory the Great wrote to him : ' The armies 
 of my sovereign will be strengthened against their enemies, 
 in proportion as the armies of God, whose warfare is by 
 prayer, are increased.'^ And Gregory was right. Industry 
 draws strength from the spirit of man as well as from 
 his sinews. Those who put new life and hope into humanity 
 are preparing for the fields the noblest tillage. Population, 
 agriculture, industry, grew mightily through the monastic 
 ages ; and nothing was lost but, in the long run, much 
 gained by the anti-secidar action and influence of the Church. 
 Our own Alfred understood the matter thoroughly. ' Tliese 
 are the materials,' he writes, ' of a king's work, and his 
 tools to govern with, that he should hnxa prayer-men, and 
 army-men, and work-men. Wliat ! thou knowest that with- 
 out these tools no monarch can show his skill.' 
 
 One of the most fruitful works done l)y these ' prayer- 
 '^Epislol., IT. G2. 
 
LEARNING IN THE MONASTERIES. 135 
 
 men ' for society was their care for education and for litera- 
 ture and art. On this subject there is the less need to 
 speak because on the whole it is fairly recognised. Those 
 who have not looked into the matter, would be amazed at 
 the vast apparatus for literary work and for the instruction 
 of children, and that not for ecclesiastical purposes only, 
 which was maintained by all the great Benedictine houses. 
 They had their outlying schools and preaching stations in 
 the most obscure villages, as the Methodists distribute their 
 local preachers in these days. In truth a fair picture of 
 a day'.? work at such monasteries as Corby under Paschasius, 
 Fulda under Eabanus, or Glastonbury under Dunstan, would 
 reveal an earnest, loving, and energetic activity in the work 
 of the world's culture, which would have put the work of 
 our leading Universities fifty years ago, to an open shame. 
 Taking even the darkest of all dark ages, the tenth century, 
 which Baronius says, ' for its sterility of every excellence 
 may be denominated iron ; for its luxuriant growth of 
 \'ice leaden ; and for its dearth of writers dark,' a diligent 
 study of its records would reveal, that the decay of learn- 
 ing and scholarly zeal was the fruit of war and political 
 misery ; while it is as full as any age of the noble devotion 
 of the harried and miserable monks to literature, and of 
 their sorrow over its inevitable decline. Their lamentation, 
 when their houses were laid in ruins, was over their books 
 as well as their relics, and many a touching story might 
 be narrated of the cost at which even the fragments which 
 survived were saved. The question, too, has to be con- 
 sidered, if we would understand the times, how far very 
 much of this literary work, especially the wearisome task 
 of transcription, would have been po.ssible except under the 
 constraint to labour which the monastic law brought to 
 bear on man. The poor transcriber of St. Gall who scratched 
 on the margin of his MS. ' Lihro completo SaHat scriptor 
 
136 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM. 
 
 p&dc Imto,' was only one of a vast army of devoted workers 
 for the intellectual good of mankind. Nothing but their 
 conception of the virtue of monastic obedience could have 
 borne them through the wearying toil. We owe them a 
 bitter grudge for the treasures they destroyed. Many a 
 copy of the lost books of Livy or the lost plays of Menander 
 was obliterated, no doubt, for the sake of some wretched 
 saintly biography ; but we accept this as the inevitable 
 counterpoise to the grand literary service which they rendered 
 to the world. Not for themselves, but for us they did 
 minister. They laboured ; we have entered into their labours. 
 It was a monk, a monk of monks, a pure and lofty spirit, 
 the beloved and honoured Bede, who wrote our first history, 
 and brought the civilising influence of literature to bear 
 on our land. It was a monk, Benedict Biscop, who brought 
 back from Eome plans of churches and dresses and vessels, 
 which started our fathers on their path of industrial and 
 artistic development ; it was in monasteries that the master- 
 pieces of ancient literature, as far as they were preserved, 
 were studied with passionate ardour, and the course of 
 intellectual development was commenced which Shakespeare, 
 Milton, and Newton crowned. One is surprised to find how 
 much time the famous Boniface, greatest of all missionary 
 monks, spent in correcting the themes of English girls in 
 the nunneries ! The monks, too, were the chroniclers of 
 medifeval society. Why ? Distinctly because they were 
 able to grasp, as no other men were able to grasp, the 
 idea of God's interest in human history, because they saw 
 that man's history in its wholeness was a Divine work. 
 Each little chronicle of an obscure monastery must weave 
 itself in with the history of the Creation, the Deluge, and 
 the Advent of the Lord. We may almost say that here, 
 in the monastic cell, was nourished the germ of our great 
 modern achievement, the philosophy of history. This is a 
 
SUMMARY. 137 
 
 tempting tlieim; : bow the lje;iinning8 of secular art, nrlawi, 
 and ]it<-ra.ture rose from the monastic loot, but there ifi 
 no rsjface for further details. 
 
 Very deeply, also, the literature which the monks loved and 
 fostered touched the heart and lightened the burdens of the 
 '^;rcii,t mass of the poor. Monkish and saintly biographies — 
 there are some 2.5,000 of them in the Bollandist Collection — 
 are full of grotesque images and childish miracles. But with 
 all their fantastic supematuralisin, their pueiile superstition, 
 their trivial and unnatural incidents, at the heart's core of 
 them they were sound enough ; purity, loyalty to truth, and 
 iiliove all charity were the graces wfiich they celebrated, 
 and the victory of lueekness, modesty, truth and mercy, over 
 brutality and ferocity, was always their theme. We must 
 remember that this was the iige of the childhood of Christian 
 society. Our children's books still are full, and long may 
 they be fidl, of the most miraculous triumphs in the long 
 run of the good hoy or girl over the bad one ; and all the 
 agencies of nature are freely laid under contribution to secure 
 the victory. These lives of the saints, the literature of the 
 poor, were the nursery books of P^uroxje, and they helped 
 mightily to keep some thought of what Heaven loved and 
 cared for, alive in the popular heart. 
 
 Here, then, is a vast body of most invaluable service 
 rendered to the intellectual, the moral, and the political pro- 
 gress of society. We can hardly believe that any purely 
 secular combination of men to build, and work, and write, 
 on the best patterns ; to multiply njanuscripts ; and to re- 
 buke injustice, brutality, and war, could have endured for a 
 generation. The monks did what they did in the secular, 
 because they felt they were doing an appointed work in the 
 spiiitual sphere ; bringing according to their lights, the power 
 of Christ's Gospel to bear on men. 
 
 In conclusion, it would be wrong to be unmindful of the 
 
138 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM. 
 
 fearful picture of corniption, of the tales of unutterable 
 abominations and horrors, which might be drawn from 
 authentic monastic history. A life of such high tension, 
 kept at full pitch so long, inevitably, when the tension re- 
 laxed, sank into dark, sad depths. Great spiritual move- 
 ments are powerful for a time only. Very noble, beautiful, 
 heroic, in many respect?, this one was, while the red blood of 
 its youth was in it : very pallid, foul, and base it became when 
 it dragged on a dull mechanical existence after its work in the 
 world was done. To judge it aright we must look at it in its 
 prime ; in the light of its aims, aspirations, and hopes. It 
 would be easy to show what dragged monachism to the dust ; 
 it is more profitable to consider what enabled it, in spite of 
 this constant human proneness to corruption, to regenerate 
 itself so often, and to endure so long. 
 
 On the whole, we must say, to sum up the matter, that 
 nothing in the long run and on a large scale succeeds in God's 
 world but God's law. Extremes on either hand are ultimately 
 fatal. In the beginning God made them male and female, 
 body and soul, man and the world. All rebellion against His 
 institution is in the end futile and ruinous. Xo doubt it 
 would have been a blessed thing if the monks had had an 
 open eye for this world as well as for the world to come. 
 Men, however, as a rule, see but one thing thoroughly at a 
 time. Any great principle which has entered largely into the 
 life of humanity, has held for generations and even ages, 
 almost exclusive possession of some considerable section of 
 society. Hence the march of humanity has been a march en 
 zigzag. Whenever any one masterful principle has possessed the 
 world and bent it powerfully in one direction, there has never 
 failed to appear some equally important principle which has 
 seized society in time and turned it in the other, and thus, the 
 world swaying now in one direction, now in another, but ever 
 onward, a clear progress through the ages has been gained. 
 
VI. 
 ST. BERNAED, THE MONASTIC SAINT. 
 
VI. 
 
 ST. BERNARD, THE MONASTIC SAINT. 
 1091-1153. 
 
 The point now reached is one that affords an opportunity 
 for a glance backwards and forwards over the ground already 
 traversed and that which lies before us. In the age preceding 
 the Advent, the philosophic schools had devoted increasing 
 attention to practical questions of the conduct of life, and 
 during the first Christian centuries the most earnest thinkers 
 among the Stoics, by their attention to pressing personal and 
 moral problems, had approximated in certain respects to the 
 Gospel. As soon as Christianity was established it began to 
 carry out that fundamental regeneration of society at ^Yhich 
 the Stoics had aimed. Christian ideas now clothe themseh'es, 
 in successive ages, in different institutions which attempt one 
 after the other to maintain the body of Christian truth and 
 influence against the many opposing tendencies of the times. 
 Erom the fifth century onwards the monastic system gathered 
 in to itself the best life of Christendom, and strove to effect 
 the salvation of society. Later on in the Middle Ages, behind 
 the monks appears the structure of the medieval Church, in 
 which the Popes stand forth as the organs of the thought and 
 influence of the whole clerical world. Then the Papacy grows 
 magnificent and wanton, rich in possession and prerogative, 
 but poor in honour and love. Behind it, in the hour of its 
 chief splendour, rise up to sustain it the Mendicant Orders. 
 
142 ST. BERNARD. 
 
 Little clreained Innocent III., as he walked that evening on 
 the terrace of the Lateran Palace, when Francis of Assisi with 
 his tattered troop of disciples drew near, that the men were 
 before him who should restore the faith of Christendom for 
 a while in the ideas which the Papacy was dishonouring, and 
 by renewing the springs of its life, secure for it a new lease of 
 power. When these fail there is nothing behind to serve as a 
 fresh support, at least nothing ' of this building.' The next 
 great movement, the herald of the Eeformation, will open with 
 John Wyclif, and a fresh reading of the word of the Gospel, 
 and with a new baptism of the Spirit of the Lord. 
 
 Four conspicuous men of the saintly order left their impress 
 deeply on the life of Europe during the Middle Age — St. 
 Bernard, St. Thomas of Canterbury, St. Francis, and St. Louis. 
 Each was typical of a certain aspect of the saintly character, 
 and from the point of view thus indicated they are dealt with 
 in the following pages. 
 
 The two greatest of the saints were St. Bernard and St. 
 Francis, and the greatest of the pair was St. Francis. He was 
 a creator; the rule which he founded had a new idea in the 
 heart of it, and his Mendicant Order, in ways which it would 
 be very interesting to trace, led on in a direct line to the 
 Eeformation. St. Bernard created nothing, but his career and 
 his 'i.'ita] influence on his times, were perhaps the greatest 
 moral forces which through the whole ]\Iidclle Age of Christen- 
 dom were brought to bear on men. He carried to the highest 
 point of perfection and of power that monastic idea, which was 
 a great constructive force in Christendom for centuries, but 
 whose function ended with his life. Bernard entered the 
 world frequently, in fact the world had need of him and could 
 not get on without him ; but he always entered it sorrowfully, 
 and as matter of dire necessity, longing the while with a 
 passionate desire for the cj^uiet cell and the holy duties of his 
 
FOUR TYPES OF SAINTHOOD. 143 
 
 beloved Clairvaulx. He was the greatest of the great monks 
 and the last of them. When he died an age died with him, 
 ■and the old monachism lay buried in his grave. Monachism 
 as an institution lived on ; the monks as great landlords and 
 scholars rendered noble service to agriculture and learning, but 
 the Ccsnobite as a vital power in Christian society was last 
 incarnate in St. Bernard. 
 
 If St. Bernard ends an age, St. Francis opens one. Bernard 
 gathered up the whole strength and nobleness of the popular 
 ■opinion of his times, and used it to serve his times. But he 
 was really a man of the past. Like Porapeius, he rooted his 
 life in an old and perishing order of things. Francis, like 
 •Cfesar, was the pioneer of a new order ; when he died he left 
 behind him a new ecclesiastical world. The friars of St. 
 Francis would now play the chief part on the stage of the 
 Church till the era of the Eeformation, opened in England 
 by John Wyclif. If the passionate desire of the monk was 
 to get out of the world, that of the friar was to get into 
 the world, and to mix freely with men. Wherever the throng 
 was thickest, there was his work ; he mingled with the people 
 and lived by persuading them. By bringing the Gospel into 
 intimate contact with the daily life and busy occupations of 
 mankind, St. Francis leads on to St. Louis, in whom the 
 saintly character and life passed out into the secular sphere, 
 while on the other hand the teaching of the Franciscan school 
 formed the true link of connection between the Middle Ages 
 and the sixteenth century. 
 
 Between St. Bernard and St. Francis, a very remarkable 
 man, who earned as a saint an almost unique reputation, 
 played a leading part on the theatre of European history. 
 St. Thomas of Canterbury, better known to us as Becket, 
 was almost worshipped as saint and martyr for generations 
 after his death. But he was after all but an ecclesiastical 
 saint. He sought and he used the saintly character, quite 
 
144 ST. BERNARD. 
 
 honestly no doubt, Imt very visibly, as an instrument of 
 ecclesiastical power over men. Becket lived in the world 
 of popes, bishops, kings, barons and .statesmen, as a man 
 of the world, whose business lay in the midst of the political 
 and ecclesiastical activities of his time. He was more at 
 home fighting the battle of the Church against Henry II. 
 than playing the saint at Pontigny. The battle of his life 
 to maintain the privileges of the hierarchy, and to secure 
 the independence of the irajjcriam of the Church from any 
 secular control, was as purely a worldly battle as the struggle 
 of Henry to maintain his throne. It was power which Becket 
 was fighting for, the power of the priesthood, the power of 
 the Church ; though he had, no doubt, a very high purpose of 
 using that power for the protection of the oppressed and 
 for what he deemed the best interests of mankind. The 
 uppermost thought in Becket's mind throughout his stormy 
 primacy was the influence of an Order, the triumph of which 
 as an Order would have been just as fatal to the true welfare 
 and progress of society on the one hand, as, on the other, 
 the unchecked dominance of the most absolute seciilar 
 tyranny. 
 
 St. Bernard was the monastic saint. His monk's cell 
 was dearer to him than any spot on earth ; his deepest 
 desiie, his most fen"ent prayer, was that he might be left 
 there alone with God, far from the haunts of men and the 
 turmoils of the great world, to train his soul in Christian 
 knowledge and holiness, and help his brethren around him 
 in the path to heaven. That cell was a storehouse of spiritual 
 force with which, again and again, he shook the civilised 
 world. He had no longing for the power ; he greatly 
 dreaded the constant stormy excitement in which it enveloped 
 him ; though we can hardly question that a man with such 
 a remarkable capacity for command felt a throb of satis- 
 faction when he saw the pope, the emperor, kings, prelates. 
 
HIS SPIRITUAL INFLUENCE. 145 
 
 and all the host of Christendom, like clay under his hand 
 to be moulded by his will. 
 
 The true spring of the incomparable power which he 
 wielded was his noble simplicity, purity and unselfishness. 
 He embodied more than any man of his day the Christian 
 idea, as it was then understood, and men believed that 
 through Bernard it was Christ that was ruling their hearts. 
 He mistook, as we all in our measure mistake, the counsel 
 and spirit of the Master to whose service he gave himself 
 with passionate devotion. He did not understand, it was 
 hard for such a man in those days to understand, that the 
 great world with all its temptations and snares is the 
 divinely appointed training school of man's spirit ; and that 
 the proscription of any faculty or element in our wonderfully 
 compacted nature avenges itself in the end with unfailing 
 retribution. No scheme which would re-make man's nature 
 on a simpler and more one-sided plan, has in it the elements 
 of more than a momentary success. Men we are, men we 
 must be ; with passions and appetites as well as convictions 
 and sympathies ; with a spirit which can believe, with an 
 intellect which can question, and with a flesh that can desire 
 its own satisfaction. Not in the proscription of any, but 
 in the harmony of the whole, lies the true dignity of our 
 nature and the true happiness of our lives. We are able 
 to understand this better in our day, because Bernard 
 and men like Bernard tried so thoroughly the ascetic 
 Hcheiue of life in their own. Bernard was the saint 
 pure and simple. His ecclesiastical influence was enor- 
 mous, his political influence was enormous ; but they 
 were, if we may so say, the mere accidents of his saint- 
 ship. The true core of his influence was spiritual ; his 
 one great aim in his intercoui'se with men was to make 
 them more pure, more just, more merciful, more peaceful. 
 Even the Crusade was preached by him in the hope of 
 
146 ST. BER^^ARD. 
 
 bringing in more swiftly the peaceful and blessed Divine 
 reign. 
 
 Quis custodiet ipsos custodes ? Who shall guard the guards, 
 who shaU rule the rulers ? was the question which forced 
 itself on the most thoughtful and provident minds in heathen 
 society. Through all the epochs of the great Oriental despot- 
 isms, in the time of Alexander and the Macedonian kingdoms, 
 and finally and signally in imperial Eome, men felt the 
 need of some fixed principle or superior power behind and 
 above the human potentate ; some overlord, whose righteous 
 decree, remaining constant through the ages, should bring 
 a strong constraint to bear on the caprices and passions of 
 the rulers of mankind. One of the characteristic differences 
 between heathen and Christian society, lay in the recogni- 
 tion in the latter of such a superior power, such an overlord 
 of all the lordships of the earth, who held the sovereign 
 direction of the affairs of the great world. It is impossible to 
 imderstand the development of Christendom, unless we take 
 note of the enormous influence which this sense of a living 
 authority on high, exerted on the heart and the conscience 
 of mankind. In the heathen States a Xero or a Commodus 
 was the ' prtesens Jupiter,' and he seemed to the anxious 
 eyes and hearts that watched him practically omnipotent 
 to work out his malignant will. In Christendom, though 
 there might be a tyrant on the throne, he was not felt to 
 be the supreme arbiter for the time of human destinies. 
 Men saw an authority above him, able to set him bounds 
 and to maintain, through aU the wreck which he made 
 around him, the order and progress of society. There can 
 be no question that the sense of this overlordship of the 
 King of kings, did exercise a strong controlling and regulating 
 influence, both on the conduct of rulers, and still more on 
 those thoughts of men about the duties of superiors and the 
 
THE NEED OP A SUPREME LORD. 147 
 
 rights of iiiferioi's, from which the enlightened public opinion 
 of modern times haw been in great measure evolved. In 
 these days monarchs, statesmen, bishops, magistrates, all 
 wlio are in authority, and whose acts may be a great blessing 
 or a great bane to mankind, proceed under strong but benign 
 constraint ; they are ruled in ruling, to an extent they little 
 dream, by the public judgment of their fellow men. We 
 may call this the growth of the Christian conscience of 
 society ; some speak of it as the consolidated experience 
 of the past generations of mankind ; and this is true of the 
 body of it, though the soul of it comes from above, and 
 descends to us through this idea of a supreme Lord of 
 monarchs and masters, which has been one of the most 
 powerful forces that have moulded and developed Christian 
 society. 
 
 We shall quite mistake the matter if we imagine that 
 Christendom, throughout the Middle Age, was content to 
 seek this authoritative supervision in such an institution as 
 the Iloman Church. If the Christian world had been able 
 continuously to trust and to obey the Roman See, nine- 
 tentha of the struggle and anguish which have attended its 
 development might have been spared. The chronic distress 
 of medieval society arose, from its intense conviction that 
 there was such superior divine authoi'ity, joined with the 
 difficulty it found in discerning and bringing it to bear. It 
 was essentially an ideal thing, this kingdom which ruled 
 the kingdoms. No one knew what was its organ, and how 
 its power was exercised. And yet men believed profoundly 
 that it was real, the greatest of all realities ; and that it 
 did through all manner of channels make its influence felt 
 in the world. The Papal See offered itself as its earthly 
 regent. The Roman Church had indeed immense advan- 
 tages in its organisation, its continuity, and its host of 
 zealous servants in every land of Europe devoted to the 
 
148 ST. BERNARD. 
 
 will of its head. One of the points of deepest interest in 
 mediaeval history is, however, to be found in the struggle of 
 Christendom not to be made an earthly empire under the 
 supreme sway of the ' vicar of Christ ' at Eome. 
 
 The effort to discover something nobler, purer, diviner, 
 than the rule which Eome could offer, constitutes the real 
 drama of the epoch. Eome seemed to offer what Christen- 
 dom wanted, a symbol of unity and an authoritative head ; 
 and yet men moved uneasily imder the paternal authority 
 of the Papacy. Kot in the Eeformation epoch alone, but 
 through the whole Middle Age, the resolution of Christian 
 Europe not to put herself under the hand of Eome, is the 
 key to the most momentous passages in European annals. 
 The Pope conquered at Canossa ; and the emperor shivered 
 in his shirt in the snow. But it was a fatal victory. It 
 made the lay mind understand that the paternal rule was a 
 stem tyranny, and there was always suppressed, and often 
 open, war between the secular mind and the Church from 
 that day until the Eeformation. When Bernard lashed the 
 vices and corruptions of Innocent or Eugenius, when Cathe- 
 rine of Sienna laid bare the iniquities of the hierarchy in 
 her days, when Petrarch uttered his tremendous anathema 
 against the Papal Court in the celebrated sonnet : — 
 
 Fountain of woe, harbour of endless ire. 
 Thou school of error, shrine of heresies ! 
 Once Eome, now Babylon, the world's disease, 
 
 the mind of Europe went with them. Christian men saw 
 the corruption and pollution and groaned over it ; and yet 
 if this higher authority were not there, "Where was it ? and 
 so this question kept Europe in unrest for at least five- 
 hundred years. Whenever a man of eminent holiness and 
 fervour, like Bernard, arose, Europe turned from Eome to 
 him as flowers turn to the sun. The Papacy for a time 
 was nothing, the saint was all. Why ? Because he seemed 
 
HIS PERSONAL FORCE. 149 
 
 to waiting hearts to realise the hope which long had mocked 
 them ; to wield a pure and righteous authority, which looked 
 like some fair earthly image of that of the unseen King ; and 
 as he moved about the world an incarnate conscience of 
 Christian society, everywhere observed with the deepest 
 veneration and served with the most passionate devotion, he 
 seemed to them to reveal the longed-for principle of unity. 
 Christendom became then, for a time, one "reat household 
 of faith, whose abbot, or father was a man of holy heavenly 
 spirit, the law of whose rule was the celestial wisdom, the 
 sceptre of whose sway was the divine love. A man like 
 Bernard, in his unselfishness, his lofty indifference to ease 
 or pain, his high idea of the virtue, the purity, the noble- 
 ness becoming a Christian profession, and in his incomparable 
 influence over men, seemed to supply to Christendom that 
 for which it had long been pining, but which the Eoman 
 Church, in spite of the honest efforts of its best rulers, could 
 not in the nature of things afford. In Bernard men saw a 
 true paternal authority, a head of the great family, whose 
 headship, like the kingdom of God, was not in word but 
 in power ; a father whom they could with their whole hearts 
 obey, honour, and love. 
 
 It is probable that Bernard wielded the strongest personal 
 influence over his fellow men that was ever exercised by a 
 man in this world. There was a certain magnetic force 
 about him which was resistless, but, at the same time, to 
 admit that he possessed this unique individual power, is far 
 from implying that he was the greatest man of the Middle 
 Age. On the contrary, even in his own days, Peter Abelard 
 was a man of far higher genius, though the fair unfolding 
 of the noble germs with which his nature was richly charged, 
 was sadly marred by his selfishness and vain-glorious pride; 
 while, in the next age, a greater man was St. Francis with 
 his new and far-reaching ideas. We may depend upon it 
 
150 ST. BERNARD. 
 
 that a man must have a certain strain of commonness in 
 him, who is so universally popular and successful as was 
 Bernard. The men whom the world worships in their life- 
 time are neither its prophets nor its p)ioneers. Bernard, 
 however, in his times and for his times was a man of alto- 
 gether matchless force, and made it felt, in a way which 
 has no parallel before or since, over the whole Christian 
 world. 
 
 No attempt need here be made to recount the mere 
 outward events of Bernard's life, but it may just be noted 
 that he was born at Fontaines in Burgundy in 1091. He 
 entered the monastery of Citeaux in 111.3. He was sent 
 out in 1115, young as he was, at the head of twelve monks 
 to found a new monastery in the waste. In 1130 he 
 conducted, we may say single-handed, the struggle which 
 placed Innocent II. in the Papal Chair. In 1140 he 
 entered the lists with Peter Abelard, the leader of an 
 intellectual movement, destined in time to undermine the 
 system of authority which Bernard so strenuously upheld. 
 In 1145 he preached the second Crusade. In 1147, six 
 years before his death in 1153, he was in the South, and 
 extinguished for the time the nascent heresy in Provence, 
 a district two hundred years in advance of the rest of 
 Europe in point of culture and free thought. Bernard was 
 contemporary with Henry I. of England, Louis VI. and 
 VII. of France, Henry V., Lothair II., Conrad III. of the 
 Empire, and Popes Innocent II. and Eugenius III., and he is 
 altogether the most prominent figure in Christendom between 
 the two greatest Papacies of the Middle Age, that of Gregory 
 VII. which closed in 1085, and that of Innocent III. 
 which opened in 1198. The Papal Empire was founded l.iy 
 Hildebrand at the close of the eleventh century. It attained 
 to the height of its power under Innocent III., who was 
 reigning in the year 1200. In the year 1300 Boniface 
 
THE HOME AT FONTAINES. 151 
 
 VIII., the last of the great Imperial Popes, held with great 
 pomp and splendour the Universal Jubilee, and from that 
 hour the Papacy began visibly and rapidly to decay. 
 
 There are iive great acts in the drama of Bernard's life. 
 His sweeping with him every member of his family, the 
 married and the unmarried alike, into the monastic pro- 
 fession ; the campaign, we can call it nothing else, by which 
 he seated Innocent II. in the Papal Chair ; his struggle 
 with the great free-thinker Abelard and his signal conquest ; 
 his preaching the second Crusade ; his battle with the 
 heretics in Provence, shortly before his death. The inter- 
 vals were filled up by attention to everything above average 
 importance which took place in Christendom, by incessant 
 correspondence, some of it of remarkable power, with all 
 sorts of men and women, and on all sorts of themes. Nothing 
 indeed came amiss to him, from the squabbles of Yorkshire 
 monks to the struggle for the Papacy, from ruling the con- 
 duct of counts, kings and popes to contentions about some 
 unhappy pigs ^ — all was within the scope of his interest. It 
 is more than possible that his greatest achievement in 
 point of difficulty was his first ; and to that, that we may 
 understand the man Bernard liimself, we will now proceed. 
 
 Towards the close of the eleventh century there was a 
 knightly household living in the Castle of Fontaines in Bur- 
 gundy. The province is the richest, the most splendid, the 
 most joyous, the most vital of all the regions of Prance. 
 The men are like its wines, full of colour and fire. It is 
 the country of great orators ; Bernard and Bossuet were 
 born in Burgundy, and many a masterful spirit beside. 
 Fontaines was the home of a very noble, but by no means 
 rare, specunen of the feudal household of the times. Tesselin 
 was at the head of it ; a man who strove hard in a stormy 
 time to be the knight of Christ ; fighting with such con- 
 
 " See for the incident, Morison's Life of St. Bernard, Lond. 1863, p. 492. 
 
152 ST. BERNARD. 
 
 spicuous courage in all the wars in which he was bound 
 to serve, that it is said that whenever he followed his 
 Duke to the battle, victory contmually attended him; but one^ 
 who was also resolved as firmly, to do justly, to love mercy, 
 and to walk humbly with his God. Bernard came of a 
 noble Ime, but that was absolutely of no account in this 
 matter of saintship. The Eoman Church did at any rate 
 keep open, through the ages in which the caste organisation 
 of society was peculiarly hard and stern, a career of splendid 
 possibilities of distinction and influence to the capable 
 among the poorest of the poor ; and the value of that to 
 the development of Christian society it would be hard for us 
 to rate. At the same time, through Hildebrand's victorious 
 struggle to impose celibacy on the clergy, the Roman priest- 
 hood never became a caste, as it has become in the Eastern 
 Church, to the degradation of the priest and the im- 
 poverishment of society. The wife of Tesselin, the mother 
 of Bernard, Alith or Aletta, ruled the household in Christian 
 love, and, as we might be sure about the mother of Bernard, 
 she was one whose life helps us to understand how in that 
 twelfth century, among rude soldiers who had not lost 
 the eye for nobleness, purity, and grace, the worship of 
 woman arose. Six sons and one daughter were born to 
 her, whom William of St. Thierry says she nursed herself, 
 and in infancy devoted to God. 
 
 Bernard was educated in the school of Chatillon. Space 
 will not allow of any notice of his boyhood, but he was 
 unquestionably both following the inherited instinct and 
 fulfilling his boyhood's passionate dream, when in his 
 twentieth year in a wayside church, he fell on his knees 
 and with a torrent of tears gave himself to God. In that 
 age this meant monastic vows, for the age of the saintly 
 layman, St. Louis, had yet to dawn. But Bernard was not 
 a man to move alone. The young monk must begin at 
 
THE BROTHERS. 153 
 
 once his work of persuading and ruling men, and began it 
 where it was hardest, in his own country and in his father's 
 house. His uncle and two of his younger brothers yielded 
 at once. Guy, the eldest, was married and had children ; 
 and he fought hard against the spell. At last he promised 
 that, if his wife would consent, he would yield. ' She will 
 either consent or die,' said Bernard. But she did neither, 
 and Guy was in sore distress. He offered, so strong was 
 Bernard's power, to give up house and lands, and to till the 
 soil as a peasant, if his home might remain unbroken. 
 But Bernard knew no middle course. The absoluteness 
 which marked him through life was already developed. 
 Then heaven seemed to help him. The young wife fell into 
 a grievous infirmity, and the scales dropped from her eyes. 
 She cried that she was kicking against the pricks, sent for 
 Jjernard, and j^elded herself unreservedly into his hands. 
 Gerard, the second son, was a gay and gallant soldier ; a 
 man of rare fascination, as we may gather from the won- 
 derful sermon which Bernard, after long years of monastic 
 fellowship, sobbed out over his grave. He took a light 
 view of the matter, and tried to laugh off Bernard's claim. 
 Bernard is said to have fixed a finger on his side, and 
 warned him quietly. ' A day will come and soon, when a 
 lance shall pierce thee here, and make a way to thy 
 heart for the counsels of salvation which thou desjjisest.' 
 Gerard, struck shortly after by a lance-head in battle, cried, 
 ' I turn monk, monk of Citeaux.' The youngest son, Nivard, 
 was now alone with the old man in his almost childless 
 home. Guy said to the lad as the brothers took their last 
 farewell of their domain, ' See my brother, the whole of 
 our inheritance will devolve on thee.' ' Heaven to thee, and 
 earth to me ; that's no fail- division,' said the lad, and 
 promptly followed in the same steps. The old forsaken 
 father, the last of the Hne, soon joined the band at Clair- 
 
154 ST. BERNARD. 
 
 vaulx, and died in Bernard's arms. Many whom the young 
 no\'ice won round liim were married. He had a nunnery 
 built for the wives at Juilly, in the diocese of Langres ; the 
 wife of Guy became the first abbess ; and there, after a 
 worldly career among the noblest in France, Hombeline, the 
 only sister, found rest at last. 
 
 They all betook themselves to Citeaux. It had been 
 founded fifteen years before, by some monks who were weary 
 of the luxury and splendour of Cluny, in a savage wilderness 
 near Chalons, and was then under the rule of Stephen Hard- 
 ing, an Englishman, whose discipline was the austerest in 
 France. These first Cistercian monks rose at two in the 
 morning, and they took their only meal at two in the after- 
 noon, after twelve hours of prayer and work. Meat, fish, 
 butter, and eggs were absolutely forbidden, and milk was a 
 rare luxury. Their garments were of the coarsest wool, and 
 their house of the severest simplicity. There, one day in 
 the year 1113, the iron hammer which hung at the lonely 
 gale of the monastery sounded, and a large number of men 
 entered the cloister, which was hardly ever visited except 
 by some traveller who had been benighted in the forest. 
 Thirty persons entered, and coming to Stephen begged to be 
 admitted as novices. There were among them men of middle 
 age who had shone in the councils of princes, and who had 
 hitherto worn nothing but the furred mantle and the steel 
 hauberk which they now came to exchange for the cowl of 
 St. Benedict. The greater part of them were men of noble 
 features and deportment, and well might they be, for they 
 were of the noblest houses in Bui-gundy. The whole troop 
 was led by a young man of about twenty-three years of age, 
 and of exceeding beauty. He was rather tall in stature, 
 his neck was long and delicate and his whole frame very 
 thin, like that of a man in weak health. His hair was of 
 a light colour, and his complexion was fair, but with all 
 
EARLY AUSTERITIES. 155 
 
 its paleness there was a virgin bloom spread over his cheek. 
 His face was such as had attracted the looks of several 
 high-born ladies, but an angelic purity and a dove-like 
 simplicity shone forth in his eyes, which shewed at once the 
 serene chasteness of his soul. This man was he who was 
 afterwards St. Bernard, and he now came to be the disciple 
 of Stephen, bringing with him four brothers and a number 
 of young noblemen to fill the empty cells of the novices of 
 Citeaux. 
 
 Bernard, intense in everything, plunged into the austerities 
 with a kind of rapture. Harding, an able as well as holy 
 man, saw the promise of a great future in the young Bernard, 
 and young as he was, twenty-four, sent him forth as the 
 abbot of twelve monks whom he despatched to seek out 
 some wild waste spot, where they could found a new monas- 
 tery attached to the Cistercian rule. They found the ' valley 
 of wormwod,' near La Ferte, desolate and rugged in aspect. 
 There they built their modest home, making it as the ' Clara 
 Vallis,' celebrated through the wide world. There the au- 
 sterities were renewed, if possible with fresh vigour, and 
 Bernard's health utterly gave way. His frame fell into a 
 state of collapse. ' Wholly absorbed in the spirit, seeing he 
 saw not, hearing he heard not, tasting he tasted not, scarcely 
 anything by any of the senses of his body did he perceive.' 
 His life was in peril. His friend, William of Champeaux, 
 bishop of Chalons, got an order from Harding that Bernard 
 should place himself under his direction for a year. He 
 had a cottage built for him and put him under the charge 
 of an attendant, who was to see that he had proper food. 
 The attendant miserably mismanaged it. William of St. 
 Thierry, his friend and biographer, visited him in his hut. 
 He was horrified at the disgusting coarseness of the food and 
 the brutality of the attendant. He asked Bernard how he 
 fared in his new mode of life. ' Excellently well,' he replied 
 
156 ST. BERNARD. 
 
 in his own noble manner, ' I, who have hitherto ruled over 
 rational beings, am now given over by a great judgment of 
 God to obey an irrational beast.' But he never complained. 
 He had been taking coagulated blood, thinking it to be butter, 
 and oil, thinking it to be water. ' Water,' says poor Bernard, 
 simply, ' is the only thing that is pleasant to me, for it cools 
 the fever of my throat.' 
 
 He struggled through, though he remained always a sickly, 
 wan and weary man, able however to gather up his strength 
 for any demand which the interests of Christendom made 
 upon him, and to enter into every conflict with a vigour 
 which entirely prostrated every foe. He had juster views 
 of asceticism before he died. There is a passage in his book 
 de Consideratione, that runs thus, and it is a valuable testi- 
 mony from such lips, ' Temperance is not only in cutting oft' 
 superfluities, but in admitting necessities.' Much solace and 
 inspiration he found in the beauty and splendour of the 
 world around him ; indeed the monks may be said almost 
 to have kept alive in the human heart the love of nature 
 through the stormy Middle Age. ' Trust to one who has 
 had experience,' writes Bernard, ' you will find something far 
 greater in the woods than you will in books. Stones and trees 
 will teach you that which you will never learn from masters.' ^ 
 And we are told that he said that ' whatever strength 
 he had in the Scriptures, he gained chiefly in meditating 
 and praying in the woods and fields ; and that his masters 
 in this matter had been oaks and beeches.' ^ There can be 
 no shadow of a question that Bernard's whole heart was in 
 the monastic life. No ambitious dream could win his love 
 from it ; and later, when he was the most famous man in 
 Europe and passed through it more than once in triumphal 
 progress, he ever, like the dove to the ark, returned to his 
 quiet cell as the true home of his spirit and place of his 
 
 ' Epist. 106. - Vita S. Bern., auctove Guillelmo, I. 4. 
 
THE PAPAL SCHISM. ' 157 
 
 rest. He remained at Clairvaulx, praying, preaching, and 
 carrying on an almost universal correspondence, with perhaps 
 only two brief absences, probably on monastic business, until 
 1130, when the scandal of the Papal schism drew him 
 forth. But his fame spread far and wide, and his letters 
 won for him growing influence and honour, and prepared the 
 way for that splendid conflict and triumph to the history 
 of which we will now proceed. 
 
 Early in 1130 Pope Honorius II. died. A great scandal 
 attended the election of his successor. One party nominated 
 Gregory, Cardinal of St. Angelo, who took the name of 
 Innocent II. The other, the most numerous but the most 
 mercenary, elected Peter Leonis, the rich grandson of a 
 Jewish usurer, who took the name of Anacletus II. There 
 was fighting in Piome, and St. Peter's was stormed and 
 spoiled. Innocent fled to France and was warmly received ; 
 Anacletus was most powerful in Italy. The French clergy 
 were strongly on Innocent's side, and it would appear purely 
 on moral grounds. The French king and the secular auth- 
 orities were in suspense. Henry I. of England was adverse. 
 Lothair of the Empire, though disposed to recognise him, 
 thought it a grand opportunity to renew the struggle about 
 Investitures, in which his predecessor had been signally de- 
 feated. The French king, Louis le Gros, with whom the 
 first duty of decision lay, assembled a council at Etampes, 
 to discuss the question. Bernard's aid was earnestly sought. 
 Hesitating and trembling, but comforted on his way by a 
 \dsion, he attended the council. No sooner was he in pre- 
 sence than the whole council enthusiastically resolved to 
 leave the decision to Bernard — ' the business which con- 
 cerned God, should be entrusted,' they said, ' to the man of 
 God.' He accepted the task, examined the proofs, weighed 
 the evidence, and solemnly declared Innocent the head of 
 the Christian world. There can be no doubt that the moral 
 
158 ST. BERNARD. 
 
 weight was entirely in Innocent's scale, and having settled 
 the question of right decisively, Bernard threw himself with 
 intense, resistless force into his cause. The whole French 
 Church and nation he carried with him by acclamation. 
 Henry I. of England, a stern and able man, strongly in- 
 fluenced moreover by the prelates of his realm in favour of 
 Anacletus, endeavoured to make head against his rival. Ber- 
 nard brought his battery to bear upon him. He went to 
 visit him, and pressed him long in vain. But like all other 
 men, Henry went down utterly at last. The final shock is 
 characteristic : — ' Are you afraid of incurring sin if you ac- 
 knowledge Innocent ? Bethink you how to answer for your 
 other sins to God, that one I will take and account for.' Then 
 Bernard, allowing himself no breathing time, threw himself on 
 Lothair. He and Innocent went to Lifege. The Emperor 
 thought that the opportunity had come to revise the decision 
 about Investitures. Innocent and the Eoman Churchmen 
 trembled ; they were absolutely in their enemy's power ; Ber- 
 nard alone trembled not. He spoke to the Emperor, that was 
 all. He had nothing but the power of what he firmly be- 
 lieved to be the word of God, and it was sharper than a two- 
 edged sword in his hands. The Emperor too fell before him, 
 the Investiture question was dropped, and Lothair, taking the 
 bridle of Innocent's white palfrey, meekly conducted him 
 through the streets of Liege. 
 
 The most difficult task was however still to come. Ana- 
 cletus was strong in Italy, and Bernard was resolved to seat 
 his Pope in the Pontiffs Chair at Rome. The cities of Italy 
 were first attacked by letters. Genoa, Milan, Pisa, were ad- 
 monished and threatened, and again Bernard's words were all- 
 powerful. Step by step, from city to city, he conducts his 
 Pope in triumph. At Milan, the whole population, nobles and 
 people, streamed out as far as the seventh milestone to meet 
 him ; they thronged around him and plucked fragments or 
 
THE TRIUMPH OF INNOCENT. 159 
 
 single hairs from his mantle, and prostrated themselves before 
 him to beg his blessing. A transport of enthusiasm swept 
 round him and bore him on his triumphal way. The events 
 here described occupied about three years, and the chief acts 
 of the drama were separated by considerable intervals, but 
 there was no break of the continuity of Bernard's influence. 
 From first to last he swept everything in Europe before him, 
 and at length, with the Emperor on the one hand and the 
 Pope on the other, he entered Eome in triumph and seated 
 Innocent with his own hand on the Papal throne. 
 
 This healing of the Papal schism was perhaps the most 
 signal triumph of Bernard's life. And those who are able to 
 picture before the mind's eye the Europe of that epoch, and to 
 comprehend the impossibility of any purely political combina- 
 tions as comprehensive as this, will see in that triumphal pro- 
 gress perhaps the grandest instance of the resistless force of 
 this one human spirit, who gathered up, not the deepest 
 thoughts, but the purest practical aims and the wisest practical 
 judgments of the time, into the cells of that battery of vital 
 force, by whose shock he moved the Christian world. 
 
 In the course of this struggle, the greatest of Bernard's life, 
 a striking episode occurred, which perhaps reveals better than 
 any other single incident in his life the marvellous power 
 which he wielded over men. William Count of Poitiers, the 
 father of that formidable Eleanor, wife of Louis VII. of France, 
 and afterwards of our Henry II., had adopted the cause of 
 Anacletus and driven Innocent's bishop William from the See. 
 The Papal legate in Aquitaine resolved to trample out the 
 opposition at once. Only Bernard could do it, and Bernard, 
 sick and weary, was dragged to Poitiers. He sent for the 
 Count, and the Count came. He argued with all his force 
 in vain. The Count was at last persuaded to give up Ana- 
 cletus, but flatly refused to have anything to do with William, 
 his bishop. Bernard broke off the useless discussion, and 
 
160 ST. BERXARD. 
 
 eutered a church to perform mass, leaving the Count outside 
 the church door as au excommunicated person. When he had 
 consecrated the Host, he came forth with flaming eras and 
 countenance of fire, bearing the Host before him, and sternly 
 reproached the Count for his contempt of the Di\-ine com- 
 mand. Then fixing his terrible eyes upon him, for Bernard 
 was terrible at such moments, he said — 'Your Judge is here, 
 at whose name e^"ery knee shaU bow whether in heaven, on 
 earth, or in hell. Your -Judge is here, into whose hands your 
 soul will fall. Will you spurn him also ? Will you despise 
 hiui as you have his servants ? ' The Count fell senseless to 
 the groimd. They raised him; he again fell prostrate, foaming 
 at the mouth. When he came to himself he meekly gave the 
 bishop the kiss of peace, and led him back to his church amid 
 general joy. 
 
 Only a word can be said on Bernard's proceedings in re- 
 gard to the heretics of the South of France. 
 
 Provence and Languedoc were in the twelfth century very 
 markedly in advance of the rest of Europe north of the 
 Alps. Southern France was to Europe in the twelfth centiu-y 
 very much what Alexandria was in the first to the Eoman 
 world. It was the meeting point of Oriental and Western 
 influences and the theatre of au immense fermentation of 
 thought. Oriental Manichtean heresy was there, and there 
 too was pure Scriptural Christianity. It is a tempting 
 subject, the life of Languedoc in the twelfth century, but it 
 must be passed by. Enough, that heresies were fermenting 
 there which had a strong tincture of the Eeformation, though 
 this, owing largely to the nobly conservative influence of 
 men hke Bernard and Francis, was still centuries away. 
 The advisers of the Court of Eome were growing seriouslv 
 anxious about Languedoc and perplexed as to its action, till 
 at last they were driven to turn to their unfailing champion 
 the Abbot of Clairvaulx. Bernard accompanied the Papal 
 
THE MAN OF HIS TIME. 161 
 
 legate, and, as usual, all opposition went down before him. 
 Wondrous stories are told of what was called the miraculous 
 power of his works, and the hardly less miraculous power 
 of his words. He completely prostrated the heretics ; but, 
 as has been well remarked, as soon as Bernard's back was 
 turned they seem to have got up again and gone on very 
 much in the old way ! 
 
 It is time that we glanced at Bernard's relation to the 
 great intellectual movement of his times, and surveyed the 
 lists in which the strongest champion of orthodoxy, and the 
 most brilliant and adventurous free-thinker of Christendom, 
 fought (i outrance, with the result that the free-thinker for 
 the time was vanquished. 
 
 There are two classes of men in every age. The great 
 majority, who are ' of their times,' who believe the beliefs, 
 are occupied with the interests, and busy in the work, that 
 belong to their own epoch. There is always too a small 
 minority, in whom the ideas and the hopes of the coming 
 age are budding, in whom the future is beginning to shape 
 itself, who are partly out of touch with their own age, and 
 speak to it what seems a strange language ; and who are 
 accordingly accounted to be troublers of the peace of Israel, 
 perhaps emissaries from the great enemy of souls. Their 
 lot in their own age is mostly distrust and obloquy, a life 
 of disappointment and sorrow, and perhaps a broken heart. 
 In the twelfth century Bernard stands as the representative 
 of the first class. He carried up to their highest completeness 
 the ideas, the aims, and the hopes of his contemporaries. 
 He lived their idea of the perfect life. He was the popular 
 man in a word ; and though the popular man is never the 
 highest, he was perhaps the greatest, noblest, and most 
 powerful popular man that has ever lived. 
 
 The type of the second class in the age of St. Bernard 
 was Peter Abelard. As the representative intellectual man 
 
162 ST. BERNARD. 
 
 of the era, he was the leader of a movement which shook 
 to the foundations, not indeed the faith which Bernard 
 cherished in his heart, but the whole system of things 
 which Bernard upheld as the temple of that faith. The 
 movement embodied in Abelard was purely intellectual. He 
 had no programme, he proposed no reform, he simply de- 
 signed to enquire ; to search by the light of reason for what 
 was behind those forms of thought and modes of action, 
 consecrated by the tradition of ages, which such men as 
 Bernard rested upon with unquestioning confidence. Abelard 
 was a Breton, and like Bernard the son of a nobleman of 
 splendid prowess and fame. Although the eldest son, he 
 resigned at twenty all the honours and prospects of his position, 
 that he might devote himself to learning ; not, we remark, 
 to embrace, like Bernard, the contemplative life of the cloister, 
 but to attend the schools, dispute, and take part as a knight- 
 errant of Philosophy in all the intellectual tournaments of 
 his time. The stirring outburst of life which that twelfth 
 century witnessed, was nowhere more conspicuous than in 
 the intellectual sphere. The schools of great teachers were 
 thronged ; the lecture room where metaphysical subjects were 
 discussed with intense eagerness was rising as the rival in 
 attraction to the monastic cell. Abelard was a man of 
 literally exuberant intellectual power, full of the Celtic 
 brilliance and iire. He was vain, arrogant, used to conquest 
 and loving it for its own sake ; hardy to excess in reviewing 
 the most assured beliefs and habits of his times. I think 
 he made it more difficult than it need have been for his age 
 to understand him, as is often the way with heretics, and 
 he did much to provoke that bitter hostihty which hunted 
 him to his grave. Heavy were his burdens and sorrows. 
 It is touching to find the greatest thinker in Christen- 
 dom, one in his way as good a Christian as St. Bernard, 
 meditating a flight to the infidels, ' where ' he says, ' I 
 
PETER ABELARD. 163 
 
 may live at peace the Christian life among the enemies of 
 Christ.' 1 
 
 We must remember that Abelard had no desire to be, and 
 no idea that he was, other than orthodox ; and his belief was 
 that all that he was doing was not against the truth but for 
 the truth ; a view of things which theologians would do well 
 to remember, when they take in hand the crushing of heretics. 
 Abelard's intellect was unquestionably sceptical, but he had 
 no consciousness that he was a sceptic. His appeal to Eome 
 at the Council of Sens is conclusive on this point. But he 
 had the genius of enquiry. Bernard had the genius of belief. 
 The ' why ' and the ' how ' were supreme questions in the 
 mind of the one ; to the mind of the other they seemed dan- 
 gerous and paralysing suggestions of the great troubler of 
 the peace of souls. But what the world owes, nay what 
 the Church owes, to these men that have the genius of 
 enquiry, is a history which has yet to be writ. Abelard 
 had hold of the method which alone could plant belief on 
 sure and lasting foundations, while Bernard's ground of assur- 
 ance was already trembling beneath men's feet. Though the 
 life of Abelard seemed a wreck, his relation to his age was 
 deeper and more fruitful than St. Bernard's. Bernard was 
 the last of the Fathers. His quiet rest on the authority of 
 the Church would be possible to great souls like his no more. 
 His life ends an intellectual era ; Abelard's begins one. The 
 one crowns a past ; the other quickens a future. From the 
 time of Abelard even the great monks will be schoolmen, and 
 will handle the weapons with which he fought his battle, with 
 consummate mastery in defence of their orders and the system 
 of the Church. But they will be costly victories. The 
 monkish schoolmen will but build their own sepulchres. The 
 Reformation, and much more than the Eeformation, much that 
 is beyond us still, began to be from the days of Peter Abelard. 
 ' ffistoria CcUamitaium, c. 12. 
 
164 ST. BBRNAED. 
 
 It is not possible to dwell in detail on Abelard's teaching ; 
 it is a subject by itself, and a noble one. Much of his doctrine 
 we should call in these days reasonable Christianity ; while on 
 such subjects as ' prayer,' ' sin,' ' the true Christian life,' and 
 ' the offerings which are acceptable to God,' he seems to come 
 near the very heart of the truth. Bernard dreaded Abelard 
 and that spirit of free enquiry which he represented, far more 
 than he dreaded his actual heresies. He had that instinctive 
 fear which the theologian in all ages feels for what he calls 
 ' rationahsm.' Bernard saw with vague dread a spirit rising 
 and spreading which was beyond his mastery ; which was fed 
 from springs and which aimed at objects, which were alto- 
 gether beyond his sphere. 
 
 The point of %dew adopted by Abelard is sufficiently indi- 
 cated by the following words of his : — 
 
 ' It happened that I first of all applied myself to discuss the basis of 
 our faith, by the aid of analogies drawn from human reason, and com- 
 posed a treatise on the ' Divine Unity and Trinity,' for my pupils, who 
 wanted and asked for hviman and philosophical reasons, and such as could 
 be understood rather than merely spoken.' ^ 
 
 This discussing the basis of faith is naturally intolerable to 
 Bernard who writes as follows : — 
 
 ' We have fallen upon evil times. Masters we have with itching ears. 
 The scholars shun the truth and turn them to fables. . . We have 
 
 Peter Abelard disputing with boys, conversing with women. . . . He 
 does not approach alone, as Moses did, to the darkness in which God was, 
 but advances attended by a crowd of his disciples. In the streets and 
 thoroughfares the Catholic faith is discussed. Men dispute over the 
 child-bearing of the Virgin ; the sacrament of the altar ; the incom- 
 prehensible mystery of the Trinity.' ^ 
 
 Bernard was quietly keeping Lent with his usual austerity 
 at Clairvaulx, when William of St. Thierry wrote to him in 
 great distress of mind, beseeching him to take this new spirit 
 in hand. The answer is quite characteristic of Bernard. 
 When he had finished his Lent exercises, he said, he would 
 1 Hist. CaL, c. 9. - Epist. 332. 
 
THE CONFLICT. 165 
 
 take it up. He did so, and was filled with dread. He 
 remonstrated with Abelard in vain. Then he wrote against 
 him with his usual vehemence. Abelard challenged him to 
 a public disputation at Sens. Bernard shrank from it. ' I 
 am but a boy,' he writes, ' and he a man of war from his 
 youth.' ^ But in the interests of the faith he determined to 
 enter the arena. Abelard appeared with a troop of disciples ; 
 Bernard with two quiet monks. There was intense excite- 
 ment and eager expectation ; but to the amazement of all, 
 Abelard declined the contest and appealed to Eome. Again 
 Bernard was master. Before the nameless something which 
 he bore with him, the foremost intellect of the age went 
 down. Bernard got him condemned and branded as a heretic. 
 There is no need to quote the bitter, abusive words with which 
 the saint assails the sinner, the champion of orthodoxy the 
 heretic. Alas ! they remain the same through all the Christian 
 ages, and we may read them in the theological literature of the 
 last few years unchanged. 
 
 Abelard's stormy life was near to its bourne. On his way 
 to Rome to prosecute his appeal he rested at Cluny. The 
 then Abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable, the good man of 
 those days, pitying tenderly the crushed and broken-spirited 
 scholar, tempted him to remain among them and end his days. 
 There he spent a few quiet and comparatively happy years. 
 Peter reconciled him with Bernard and with Eome. He 
 bears noble testimony to his studious diligence, his piety, 
 humility, and gentleness, and with this beautiful prayer, which 
 he wrote for Heloise and sent to her as his last gift, Abelard 
 fades out of sight : — 
 
 ' Thou hast joined us, O Lord, and haat set us apart when it pleased 
 Thee, and as it pleased Thee. Now, O Lord, that which Thou hast begun 
 in mercy, do Thou in mercy perfect, and those whom Thou hast severed 
 in the world, do Thou join for ever unto Thyself in heaven. O Lord our 
 
 1 Epist. 189. 
 
166 ST. BERNARD. 
 
 hope, our portion, our expectation, our consolation, who art blessed for 
 ever, Amen ! 
 
 ' Farewell in Christ, thou spouse of Christ ! In Christ farewell ! in 
 Christ live ! Amen ! ' ' 
 
 So the dogmatist fell upon the thinker and crushed 
 him. The process repeats itself through all the Christian 
 ages, though perhaps it is the turn of the thinker to fall 
 upon the dogmatist now. But thought, crushed, like grass 
 swiftly springs again. The five thousand poor, hungry, 
 ragged scholars who streamed from city to city after Abelard, 
 thirsting to drink of the new intellectual sprmg, and to 
 arm themselves with the weapons of the new learning, 
 scattered broadcast through Europe the quickened intellec- 
 tual germs, and commenced a movement which ten thousand 
 Bernards could never stay. Slowly but surely, as dawn 
 flashes into day, thought conquers. There is sore conflict ; 
 the old order of things groans and shudders ; men's hearts 
 fail them for fear ; but in the end always a nobler, truer, 
 freer and more blessed order is born. 
 
 The position of the champions of the old order has also 
 its dignity and power. What did orthodoxy represent to 
 Bernard ; what made him its passionate defender ? It 
 represented not only what he beUeved to be God's ever- 
 lasting word of truth, but the tradition of twelve centuries 
 of heroic struggle and suffering ; it was the rock on which 
 he and his fellow men were standing, and on which alone 
 he believed they could live and work. There is but one 
 thing more sacred than the established order, and that is 
 the germ of the order which is to succeed, and that germ 
 is with the thinkers. It always goes hard with the assailants 
 of the orthodox order which the Bernards defend, and it 
 ought to go hard with them. Let not any man put his 
 hand lightly to the task of shaking the most assured beliefs 
 
 1 Abelard, Ejnst. 5. 
 
FAITH AND REASON. 167 
 
 of his fellow men. Who shall measure the anguish of the 
 travail through which the new order is born ? No sympathy- 
 is due to those who whimper over the sufferings entailed 
 by the opening up new paths for men. The pioneers must 
 expect to suffer, but they ought to persist and to conquer. 
 No man who dares not suffer for men, is fit either to 
 lead or to reign. There is no justification for the senseless 
 antagonism which is raised in these days between faith 
 and science, reason and revelation, religion and culture, 
 Hellenism and Hebraism — call them how we will. The 
 two are as needful to each other as the right hand and 
 the left, nay, as the man and the woman in the order of 
 human society. It is the shameful putting asunder of 
 that which God has joined, that is the fatal spring of 
 all the most bitter miseries which afflict the world. The 
 life which is kindled by faith quickens and moves men ; 
 the thought which is lit by reason rules them and guides. 
 The Bernards inspire and energise the great community ; 
 the Abelards light it to its tasks, widen its horizon, open 
 its paths of progress, and lift higher and yet higher through 
 the ages the standard of its aims and hopes. What we 
 need is the blending of the inHuence which they severally 
 represent. Neither the faith without the reason nor the 
 reason without the faith, but the two m concert and con- 
 cord, conspiring, breathing together, like loyal helpmeets, 
 having learnt that their internecine strife is shame and 
 confusion, will one day bring back to earth the Saturnian 
 reign. 
 
 One other great enterprise St. Bernard was destined to 
 accomplish before his work was done ; he was to preach 
 the second Crusade. The Crusades were perhaps the most 
 purely ideal enterprises ever undertaken by man. None 
 can understand the movement who has no eye for the great 
 
168 ST. BEENAED. 
 
 vision which was behind and beyond it, the fair realm of 
 Christ governed from Jerusalem in peace and splendour, 
 Christendom nobly reconstituted with the Holy City for 
 its centre, and the Prince of Peace for its King ! This 
 is what the Crusade meant to the noblest spirits that em- 
 braced it, nay, one could shew that this is what it meant 
 to the poor peasant, who followed his lord to what seemed 
 to him a holy and glorious enterprise, and who left his 
 bones to bleach in the waste. We have no imagination 
 to picture the joy that thrilled through the great heart of 
 Europe, when it was told in every city and hamlet, that 
 on July 15th, 1099, Godfrey of Bouillon, the stainless 
 hero of the Crusade, had stepped from his wooden tower 
 on to the walls of Jerusalem, and fulfilled the passionate 
 dream of the Christian world. The vision had not faded, 
 the dream had not vanished, in Bernard's days ; bitter but 
 still not hopeless disappointment was gnawing the heart of 
 Europe when Bernard, with a voice which rang through 
 Christendom and stirred it as it has never been stirred 
 before or since, preached a new, final, triumphant Crusade. 
 It was this vision which fired his passion, and made all 
 men plastic in his hands. It was this vision, too, which 
 kindled the imagination of a yet loftier spirit than Bernard, 
 the last great dreamer who dreamed the dream of the 
 Crusade — Columbus. The spring of the lofty enthusiasm of 
 Columbus, the key too to the enormous and seemingly avar- 
 icious demands on which he insisted with the sovereigns, was 
 the hope that he might win such wealth as would enable 
 him to lead a mighty army to Jerusalem, and establish 
 there, as regent of the King of Kings, the last great empire, 
 that ' fifth monarchy,' which in fulfilment of the blessed 
 and glorious visions of the poets and prophets, the Lord 
 had promised to set up. 
 
 The Crusaders embarked on a purely ideal enterprise, 
 
PREACHING THE CRUSADE. 169 
 
 and the wrath of man was to accomplish it. They took 
 the sword to establish the peaceful kingdom, and by the 
 sword they terribly perished. It is a sad, sad history. 
 Still though it miserably failed, and broke many a noble 
 heart, there is hardly a movement which has helped to 
 create our modern civilisation which did not spring from it, 
 and few secular events in the world's history have offered 
 more powerful and practical ministries to the onward and 
 upward progress of mankind. The breaking down of the 
 feudal tyrannies, the emancipation of the serfs, the rise of 
 the commons, the growth of the maritime towns, the pro- 
 gress of navigation, the establishment of banks, the develop- 
 ment of trade, and the splendid revival of art and literature, 
 all either sprang out of, or were mightily stimulated by, 
 that most purely ideal of all great human enterprises, the 
 Crusade. 
 
 How Bernard preached it, the burning enthusiasm at 
 Vezelay and Chartres, the storm of passionate crusading 
 fervour which he evoked in the indifferent or hostile Ehine 
 provinces, till, as he wrote, the cities and castles were 
 empty and hardly one man to seven women were left,^ the 
 way in which he set all Germany in flame, and compelled 
 the emperor by the sheer force of his eloquence to assume 
 the Cross ; how the vast Christian hosts swept on the East 
 like a resistless avalanche, only to be broken and die ; how 
 a shattered fragment of the crusading armies struggled back 
 again, and bowed all Europe in shame and sorrow to the 
 dust ; all this is known to the most casual student of history. 
 
 Bernard's heart was well nigh broken by the failure of 
 his hope. From that time, though he continued his mani- 
 fold activity, he set himself to die. One other entirely 
 noble witness he was to bear before his work was done. 
 This was his manly and most Christian protest against 
 
 ^Ex>ist. 247. 
 
170 ST. BERNARD. 
 
 the persecution of the Jews, upon which he wrote as 
 
 follows : — 
 
 ' Does not the Church triumph more fully over the Jews by convincing 
 and convicting them from day to day, than if she, once and for ever, were 
 to slay them all by the edge of the sword? . . . For if the Church 
 did not hope that they which doubt will one day believe, it would be vain 
 and superfluous to pray for them ; but on the conti'ary she piously 
 believes that the Lord is gracious towards him who returns good for evil 
 and love for hatred.' ^ 
 
 Bernard's work was done. His old friends and comrades 
 were dropping on every hand. Suger, the Abbot of St. 
 Denis, next to himself the most venerated ecclesiastic in 
 France and his much loved friend, died in 1151. Then in 
 1152 Count Theobald of Champagne, and in 1153 Eugenius 
 the Pope, his pupil, his child in the faith, fell asleep. He 
 felt that his hour was at hand. The prayer of his monks 
 was ceaseless and importunate. ' But why do you thus 
 detain a miserable man ? ' he cried. ' You are the stronger, 
 you prevail against me ; spare me, spare me, and let me 
 depart.' A gradual failing of the brain came on ; that brain 
 which had influenced every great event and movement in 
 Christendom in his times. Public affairs ceased to interest 
 him. ' Marvel not,' he said, when they tried to rouse him, 
 ' for I am no longer of this world.' Looking round on his 
 weeping brethren, he exclaimed, ' I am in a strait betwixt 
 two, having a desire to depart and to be with Christ, which 
 is far better ; nevertheless the love of my children urgeth 
 me to remain here below.' Then raising his dove-like eyes 
 to heaven he said, ' But the Lord's will be done.' A 
 moment, a sob, and it was done. Bernard was for ever 
 with his friends and ' with the Lord.' 
 
 ^Epist. 365. 
 
VII. 
 
 ST. THOMAS OF CANTERBURY; THE SAINT AS 
 ECCLESIASTICAL STATESMAN. 
 
VII. 
 
 ST. THOMAS OF CANTERBUEY ; THE SAINT AS 
 ECCLESIASTICAL STATESMAN. 
 
 c. 1118—1170. 
 
 It is said by the great Teacher ' He that loveth his life 
 shall lose it,' and ' he that loseth his life for my sake shall 
 find it.' It is true of happiness, of power, of whatsoever 
 outward good is desired by man. He who seeks happiness 
 will lose it ; he who is content to lose it in strenuous 
 duty will find it. He who seeks power will grasp but 
 the phantom of it ; he who loses all thought of power in 
 unselfish service of others, will find it to his own honour 
 and with the benediction of his fellow men. Bernard, 
 ha%ang no dream of power, caring nothing for power, lost 
 himself in a passionate desire to grow into his Sa^^our's 
 likeness, and became the most powerful man in Europe ; 
 Becket, of whom we have now to speak, known among 
 the saints as St. Thomas of Canterbury, aiming at power 
 by saintship, lost it, became a fugitive and an exile, and 
 died at last by brutal violence, while the power became 
 manifest only round his grave. 
 
 St. Thomas of Canterbury was a saint of an entirely 
 different type from either St. Bernard or St. Francis. 
 With him saintliness was distinctly cultivated and em- 
 ployed as an instrument of ecclesiastical power. Ecclesi- 
 astical saint is the term that most truly describes him. 
 
174 ST. THOMAS OF OANTEEBURY. 
 
 Becket was by nature a statesman ; one of the ablest 
 whom we meet with in English history. First, a secular 
 statesman of remarkable resource and insight; then, when 
 the archbishopric was forced on him, an ecclesiastical 
 statesman of splendid vigour, intensity and devotion to 
 the cause of the Church. His saintliness was part— an 
 indispensable pai't — of his equipment for his work. This 
 does not mean that Becket merely played the saint. He 
 appears to have been, on the whole, a thorough and 
 upright man, incapable of sustaining the hypocrite's part 
 through life ; but his saintliness did not grow, as in the 
 case of St. Bernard, St. Francis and St. Louis, out of the 
 depths of his nature, it was -not a part of his very Hfe. 
 lit was rather a habit put on as the proper dress of the 
 position of lofty power and dignity to which he found him- 
 self exalted ; it was worn by him, we need not doubt, 
 with entire sincerity, but always with a certam ostentation, 
 and a latent consciousness of its great influence over men. 
 The value of Becket's testimony to this influence of the 
 saintly life on Christendom is that of a man who found 
 that he could not get on without it ; that if he was to 
 carry on a stern conflict with the secular power of his 
 day, and guard and extend the prerogative of the Church, 
 he must rely mainlj^, not on his conspicuous personal 
 genius for command and his high endowments, but on 
 the love and veneration which saintliness might win 
 for him. 
 
 Very beautiful, very touching, in a rude coarse age, is 
 this reverence for the man who was believed to be up 
 in the heights and nearer to God than his fellows. Men 
 rough, brutal, hard and grasping, bent with a humble 
 child-like submissiveness to a fellow mortal, if they believed 
 that he had more to do than themselves with Heaven. 
 Great multitudes in Christendom would care more for a 
 
POWER OP THE SAINTLY IDEA. 175 
 
 hair of St. Bernard's cloak, than for the favour of its 
 secular imperial head, and this simply because they believed 
 him to be a better man, a holier man than themselves ; 
 one through whom their rude__lives might catch_ a gleam 
 of the sunlight and a breath of the air of the higher 
 world. 
 
 Becket, accordingly, not at all a saintly man by nature 
 but rather a courtier and a captain, paid the deepest reverence 
 to the saintly idea, when, as he entered on what he foresaw 
 .would be a stormy Primacy, he devoted himself with un- 
 measured intensity to the exercises and austerities of the 
 ascetic life. Most people know the tales which were current 
 about him — the hair shirt swarming with vermin ; the 
 coarse food ; the water rendered nauseous by fennel ; the 
 nights passed in prayer with intervals of flagellation. We 
 are told that his sleepy chaplain, Eobert of Merton, would 
 be roused to scourge him, and when his weary hands could 
 not lay on hard enough, the Archbishop would roll on the 
 floor, in his sackcloth, and pass the remainder of the night 
 with the boards for his bed, and a stone for his pillow. "We 
 cannot believe that all this was acting in Becket. The 
 worst austerity, the coarse sackcloth over his whole body 
 and limbs, was not discovered till after his death. There 
 was a certain thoroughness running through his whole career 
 — his Chancellorship, his embassies, his wars, as well as 
 his Primacy — which proclaims him at least no hypocrite ; 
 at the same time there was a certain ostentation about it 
 which a little profanes its sanctity, and makes it a thing 
 for us to look into and measure, rather than a thing which 
 looks into and measures us. Becket in fact saw and seized 
 the true springs of a Churchman's power when he made 
 himself a saint. It was for power he did it, but we need 
 not doubt that he honestly endeavoured to make himself 
 as good a saint as possible. 
 
176 ST. THOMAS OF CANTERBURY. 
 
 The Eomish idea of the living presence of Christ with His 
 Church, in the person and in the judgments of the Chief 
 Bishop of Christendom, was hardly condensed into form in 
 the twelfth Century. It was floating in a nebulous state in 
 the atmosphere of mediteval society, and it touched with some- 
 thing of its unearthly lustre every minister and ordinance 
 of the Church. Then the Church was the ruling idea, now 
 it is the Pope. Men trembled before churchmen because 
 of the Higher Presence that was supposed to be in them ; 
 and there was a constant struggle between the reverence 
 which the priest challenged as the organ of Christ, and 
 the hatred and contempt which the actual priest, as a 
 person, constantly awakened. So long as reverence for the 
 Church remained a sentiment pervading in a vague way 
 the whole body of Christian society, its power was incal- 
 culable. When this sentiment of the Holy Presence settled 
 finally into a theory of Papal autocracy ; when men could 
 look at it as an institution and judge it as a law, its power 
 began to wane. This is true on a wider scale. In every 
 age and in every region of man's experience, how much 
 vital vigour is lost in the transition from idea to institution, 
 from sentiment to law. 
 
 Becket stands as the representative of the pure Church 
 idea, which is not the same thing as the Ptomish system. 
 With him it is not Pope against Eling, it is Church 
 against King. Becket was a Latin churchman, and acknow- 
 ledged the Pope as his earthly head. But the help of the 
 Pope, though valuable, was not essential to his position. 
 In the twelfth century, we repeat, the idea of the Church 
 as a corporation of spiritual persons with their belongings, 
 acting as the organ of the unseen and dreaded Lord, had 
 not finally centred itself in Pome. It was gravitating 
 that way, but there was much— papal schisms, papal avarice, 
 papal corruption, and the like— to hinder it. To the oreat 
 
INDEPENDENCE OP THE CHURCH. l77 
 
 churchmen of those clays the Church was a larger thing, 
 a vaguer thing, a more spiritual thing, than it came to be 
 when it was wholly embodied at Rome ; and when the 
 Mendicant Orders had placed an enormous number of clever 
 talkers and fluent preachers, always roaming aboiit Europe, 
 at the absolute disposal of the Papal see. The struggle of 
 Becket's life was not to make a foreign spiritual potentate 
 supreme in England. The foreign potentate was a great 
 element in the matter, but Becket's idea was a higher and 
 nobler one ; it was to make the Church and everything 
 which in any way belonged to the Church, independent of 
 all but spiritual judgment ; accountable exclusively to the 
 spiritual authorities on earth, as the organs of the ultimate 
 spii-itual authority on high. A churchman like Becket said 
 in effect, ' That which is Christ's is Christ's aloue, to be 
 judged and ruled by His acknowledged organs ; the inter- 
 ference of the secular power in a matter which has any 
 spiritual aspect or interest, is like setting the Lord once 
 more before Pilate, and putting Him to an open shame.' 
 With Becket it was simply profanation of holy things and 
 contempt of Christ's supremacy, to allow spiritual matters 
 and interests to be called into question and judged in worldly 
 courts. And surely there is something here which strikes 
 one as right in assertion and claim. An Independent at 
 any rate can sympathise with it — Christ's persons, Christ's 
 things, amenable to the disposition of Christ alone. So 
 far right. But when you substitute for Christ a company 
 of ecclesiastics, it matters not whether they be Eoman, 
 Anglican, Presbyterian, or Independent (if there is such a 
 thing as an Independent ecclesiastic), we pause. ' The rights 
 of Christ ' is a phrase which one always dreads to hear 
 on the lips of a powerful body of ecclesiastics. It mostly 
 means ecclesiastical tyranny of some sort, and of all tyrannies 
 ecclesiastical tyranny is the most absolute, and the most 
 
 M 
 
178 ST. THOMAS OF CAKTERBURY. 
 
 withering to the happiness and progress of society. Christ 
 Himself describes the only ' rights ' for which He cared — 
 ' everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice ' — and such 
 are found perhaps nearly as often outside as inside the 
 visible churches. 
 
 The ground of the absoluteness of ecclesiastical tyranny 
 is the tremendous sanction which is supposed to sustain its 
 decisions, and the eternal issues which are believed to hang 
 on its decrees. It is not selfish ; some of the most conscien- 
 tious men in the Church have been the fiercest persecutors, 
 like Marcus Aurelius in imperial Eome. Its very unselfish- 
 ness has not seldom made it the more stern and cruel. 
 The struggle between Church and King was perhaps more 
 purely and thoroughly fought out between Becket and Henry, 
 than between Hildebrand and the Emperor, or Alexander III. 
 and Frederic Barbarossa. It was, of course, quite a different 
 contest from that with which we are broiTght into contact 
 in Bernard's life. That was a struggle to make the truth, 
 a spiritual thing, triumphant in the hearts and consciences 
 of men. In these other cases it was a battle of systems and 
 institutions. /_The battle was, as far as the visible actors are 
 concerned, a worldly battle, and though spiritual names were 
 used in it freely it is the names only that are spiritual.^ 
 ^he name is Christ; the thing is the Churchy We will 
 look into this a little more closely ; on a right appreciation 
 of it depends very largely a true understanding of medireval 
 history. 
 
 The ' spiritual persons ' for which exemption was claimed, 
 were not pious souls who only asked to worship in peace, 
 and, as Carlyle says, 'to hear a sermon in their own manner'; 
 they were prelates with sees as wide as provinces at the 
 head of retainers as numerous as armies, together with every 
 grade of ecclesiastics down to sextons and gravediggers and 
 the menials of monasteries ; and they comprehended, if con- 
 
POWER OP THE BISHOPS. 179 
 
 temporary history is to be credited, the scum of the rascality 
 of the land. The ' spiritual things ' included castles, palaces, 
 and the fees of soldiers bound to the defence of the realm. 
 The simple truth of the matter is, and this was the strength 
 of Henry's case, that to exempt from secular jurisdiction 
 the men and the things which were covered by the term 
 ' spiritual,' would have been to leave in irresponsible and 
 frequently lawless hands some of the strongest fortresses and 
 some of the largest estates in the realm ; to release whole 
 provinces from the duty of taking their share in the defence 
 of the commonwealth ; and to suffer some of the greatest 
 scoundrels in the country to cheat, and rob, and murder at 
 will. There were really two questions involved, that of the 
 relation of the Crown to the great ecclesiastical princes, and 
 that of legal jurisdiction over the persons and property of 
 churchmen generally and of their dependents. England, we 
 must remember, had but lately emerged from the bloody 
 confusion of Stephen's reign. The country had been reduced 
 to the lowest pitch of poverty and wretchedness. It had 
 been desolated by ceaseless petty wars ; and the main movers 
 of it all, the turbulent men of the time, had been the bishops. 
 ' The bishops at the close of the reign of Henry T.,' says 
 Milman, ' were barons rather than prelates, their palaces were 
 castles, their retainers vassals in arms ; the wars of Stephen 
 and Matilda were episcopal quite as much as baronial wars.'^ 
 The bishops were on the whole perhaps the most powerful 
 subjects in the realm. It had been to a great extent the 
 policy of the monarchs to endow the bishoprics largely, as 
 some kind of counterbalance to the overweening influence 
 of their nobles. The emperor and the kings of France and ' 
 England found their advantage in having powerful personal 
 feudatories whom they could play off against the hereditary 
 lords. In Germany, where the emperor was elected and 
 ' Latin Christianity, ]3k. VIII. Ch. 8. 
 
180 ST. THOMAS OF CANTERBaRY. 
 
 rarely attained to the complete dominion which was possessed 
 by onr kings, the question was of the very first importance. 
 There the battle about Investitures, which was really the 
 question of the measure of authority which the monarch as 
 representing the State, should exercise over these powerful 
 ecclesiastical lords, had been settled, after the direst confusion 
 and the most tremendous conflicts, on a basis of compromise 
 by the Concordat of Worms in 1122, confirmed by the 
 Council of the Lateran in 1123. According to this settle- 
 ment, the ring and the crosier, the symbols of spiritual 
 functions, were no longer to be given by the sovereign, while 
 the sceptre, the symbol of temporal lordship, was to pass to 
 the bishop from the monarch's hand. In England the con- 
 troversy had been adjusted in 1107, under Anselm, on the 
 basis that the prelate should take an oath of allegiance to 
 the king. In Germany the Archbishop of Mainz was arch- 
 chancellor of the Empire. The ecclesiastical princes were 
 next in dignity to the dukes in its Diet. Three of the seven 
 electors were churchmen ; and the archbishoprics of Trier, 
 Mainz, and Cologne, were among the largest and wealthiest 
 provinces in the Empire. The relation of these influential 
 subjects to the throne was a matter of vital importance, and 
 successive monarchs contended as for their lives that these 
 powerful and often turbulent churchmen should confess 
 themselves their vassals for their temporal dominions, and 
 give some security to the monarch as representing the 
 common weal, that they would promote instead of trouble 
 the peace of his realm. 
 
 The relation of the Crown to these greater ecclesiastical 
 vassals had been settled, and on the whole with tolerable 
 fairness, before Becket's career as a churchman began. The 
 point at issue in his day was one of legal jurisdiction, and it 
 was perhaps a still more vital one than the first, because 
 it touched, not the great princes of the Church only, but 
 
THE POINT AT ISSUE. 181 
 
 the whole ecclesiastical estate. It concerned the liability 
 of churchmen of all grades to be summoned before the King's 
 courts, to answer for crimes which were destructive to the 
 peace and the very existence of society. The King declared 
 that he had sure information that some of the clergy were 
 ' perfect devils in wickedness,' that the ecclesiastical punish- 
 ments were entirely nugatory, and that the mischief was 
 daily growing worse. The argument of the Church was that 
 the Church courts were alone competent to deal with the 
 matter, and that the Church penalties, degradation and con- 
 finement in a monastery, were sufficiently deterrent. But 
 behind this there lay in the mind of a Church champion 
 of those days, the idea of the Church as a complete spiritual 
 kingdom, co-existent with, but independent of the State ; 
 an empire having its own laws, customs, and subjects ; its 
 own princes, tribunals, revenues, and rights. The answer 
 of the secular authority was briefly, This is intolerable and 
 impracticable ; these spiritual persons are men ; they are 
 subjects ; they share the welfare of the realm ; they enjoy 
 the benefit, and they must be amenable to the judgment of 
 its laws. 
 
 However colourable, therefore, may seem the Church claim 
 to judge Church persons, when we come to see to what kind 
 of spiritual persons and things that claim extended, our 
 sympathies jsass over to the other side. It is quite possible 
 that they may pass over too absolutely. The secular is the 
 winning; side from the first ; the State is the fundamental 
 institution. Society could exist without any form of bishop, 
 but it could not exist without some form of king. (_In the 
 twelfth century, however, the State needed profoundly the 
 influences which the Church was able to bring to bear, and 
 the independence of the Church of the secular power was the 
 essential condition of their exercise.J Secular society gravi- 
 tated with a fearful proneness to brutality. Could we see 
 
182 ST. THOMAS OF CANTERBURY. 
 
 Henry IV. of the Empire or Henry II. of England as the 
 men of their own day saw them, we should shudder at the 
 idea of the supreme power being committed without restraint 
 to their hands. They were able men, with a strong desire 
 to rule for the good of their realms, but(_there was little in 
 those days to bear up a monarch against this brutalising 
 1 tendency, except the traditions and influences, one dare not 
 ' say the G-ospel, of the Church.J William Eufus is a fair 
 specimen of a ruler over whom the Ohui'ch had little sway. 
 He had sworn to Lanfranc that if he were made king he 
 would preserve justice and equity and mercy throughout the 
 realm ; would defend against all men the peace, liberty and 
 security of the Churches, and would in all things and through 
 all things comply with his precepts and counsels. But after 
 Lanfranc's death he kept the see of Canterbury vacant four 
 years, seizing its revenues and wasting its property, and 
 nothing but a serious illness frightened him into filling it. 
 The revemies of the sees and abbeys which fell vacant were 
 a mine of wealth to him, which he squandered on his pleasures. 
 Monarchs left to themselves found the revenues of rich abbeys 
 and sees convenient rewards for their minions, or marketable 
 wares of price. The ravages of simony in the mediteval 
 Church were terrible. The most ignorant, the most debased 
 incumbents were thrust into the richest benefices ; and the 
 I /_idea that the Church and piety had anything to do with each 
 other iDccame in some reigns a tradition rather than a Joeliefj 
 Even Popes pursued the vile traffic. Boniface IX. (1389- 
 1404) was constantly carrying it on, receiving the reports of 
 his agents, and giving instructions, while he appeared to be 
 saying mass. 
 
 The Church had to gather up her strength, by the help 
 of her saints, to make head against this inward corruption, 
 and against this proneness of secular hfe to the profane 
 and brutal ; and one cannot see how without her strong 
 
A POSSIBLE SOLUTION. 183 
 
 hierarchical organisation she could have done it with any 
 measure of success. The miserable degradation of the 
 Greek Church during the Middle Age, is a warning of 
 the difficulty with which a spiritual office, unbacked by 
 a powerful independent ecclesiastical system, maintains 
 itself against all the secular influences around it, and 
 especially the power of the Crown. It would have been a 
 fearful thing for England if her prelates had sunk into 
 the position of State officers of the sovereigns, like most of 
 the Byzantine patriarchs or the Eussian clergy at the present 
 day. And in this very matter, the amenability of spiritual 
 persons to secular courts, the Church had a witness to bear 
 and a work to do. One ground of her claim to reserve 
 these for her own judgment was her abhorrence of mutilation 
 and torture, which her belief in the dignity of man through 
 the Incai'nation inspired. The secular claim triumphed ; and 
 the criminals of the Church were brought gradually under the 
 stern liand of the law. Very rough was it, and fearfully 
 savage were its punishments ; but we must not forget in 
 doing justice to both parties in a great controversy, that 
 modern society has adopted fully the gentler and more 
 disciplinary views of punishment, for which the churclnnen, 
 inspired by the traditions of their order, were contending in 
 Becket's time. 
 
 Of course an easier solution of the difficulty occurs. Castles, 
 domains, vassals, what had churchmen to do with them ? 
 Let them keep to spiritual things, and live as spiritual men, 
 and the conflict with the temporal power would never arise. 
 / Strangely enough in 1111, seven years before Becket's liirth, 
 the same idea had occurred to a Pope. "^The young Emperor 
 Henry V. was descending the Alps at the head of an army, 
 and Pope Pascal II. met him with this remarkable proposal: 
 Resume the donations on which your regalian rights and 
 claims are founded, the towns, castles, duchies, and the like. 
 
184 ST. THOMAS OF CANTERBURY. 
 
 out of which these conflicts spring. Leave us our tithes and 
 private benefactions, and we will give ourselves to spiritual 
 work. ' Let Heinrich renounce his right of Investiture, and 
 the Church will immediately restore all that it has received 
 from secular princes since the tune of Charlemagne.' The 
 proposal was received with a storm of indignation. German 
 bishops and Eoman cardinals loaded the poor Pope with 
 execrations. It came to nothing ; in those days it could 
 but come to nothing. The two spheres drawing off from 
 each other, and each living its own life, would have rent 
 in pieces the very structure of society. And why ? Because 
 fundamentally, as we are learning now, the two spheres are 
 one. Unity is the aim and the longing of society. The 
 Church entered the secular sphere through its worldly organ- 
 isation, and by that instrument wrought, not pure Christian 
 ideas, but its own debased image of them, into the heart of 
 worldly society. The end of it all is the consecration of 
 the secular life, not by having always an institution which we 
 call the Church working on it from without, Ijut by the 
 dwelling of the Christian mind and spirit within it. 
 
 We are far enough from this ideal, the one holy secular 
 life ; but we are working towards it. And we are able to 
 disengage the spirit from the secular sphere and leave it 
 free to devote itself to its own spiritual exercises and duties. 
 If we recognise Christ as the sole Lord of the conscience, 
 and leave a man's belief and conduct as a spiritual being 
 untrammelled l:)y any considerations arising out of his relations 
 to civil society, it is because the two kingdoms have become so 
 intimately one, not because we are content to recognise them 
 as separate. It is because secular life has become so spiritual, 
 so penetrated and leavened by Christian ideas, that we can 
 unyoke the individual conscience and leave it free for nobler 
 ministries than men dreamed of in Becket's days. The time 
 will come — may God hasten it — when all the world will be a 
 
HIS BIETH AND EDUCATION. 185 
 
 holy temple, duty a simple worship, and life a constant 
 praise. 
 
 Becket, in contending so strenuously for the exemption of 
 the subjects of the spiritual kingdom from any but spiritual 
 jurisdiction, was the enemy of that unity towards which 
 Christian society has been always working, and he would have 
 made two realms of what should be only one. On the other 
 hand, any unity based on the supremacy of the secular power, 
 as it existed even in the highest examples of monarch and 
 noble in those times, must have been partial, base, and tending 
 to swift decay. It needed a long and stern assertion, on the 
 part of successive Popes and Primates, of the claim for which 
 Becket both stood and died, to work into the secular heart 
 those ideas and sentiments of which the Church was the 
 depository, and the possession of which is the essential condi- 
 tion of all noble and fruitful self-regulation in the State. 
 
 Becket was born in London, probably in 1118, at the house 
 of his father, a man of repute and substance, connected in some 
 way with trade, and called one of the ' barons of the city.' 
 Becket was of Norman descent, but an Englishman to the 
 backbone, which is a fact significant of the rapid welding of 
 the conc[uering and the conquered race. He was brought up 
 by the canons of Merton Abbey, and afterwards studied in 
 London, Paris, Bologna, and Auxerre, the then most famous 
 schools of canon and civil law. His education was a learned 
 one, according to the standards of the time. He was a lad, as 
 he became a man, of brilhant power ; rapid, showy, energetic, 
 with great capacity for business ; but by no means a deep 
 scholar or thinker. He was essentially a man of the world, 
 and fitted by nature for the conduct of great affairs. Tall, 
 handsome, accomplished in arts and arms, a gallant soldier, an 
 able administrator, an astute diplomatist, a splendid courtier, a 
 charming companion ; fond of pleasure up to a certain point. 
 
186 ST. THOMAS OF CANTERBURY. 
 
 but far from immoral, as Grim bears fcestimony, fonder still of 
 pomp and power, he was one of those uni\-ersal men who are 
 sure to play a leading part in every scene through which tlie 
 cun-ent of their lives may lead them, but who are wanting in 
 that depth, self-concentration, inward simplicity and patience, 
 which make the men of the very first mark in history. For 
 a man like Becket, profoimdly ambitious and with a position 
 which justified ambition but not belonging to the noble class, 
 there was but one great career, the Church ; and to one 
 of his endowments the churchman's career opened the first 
 position in the world. In keeping such a career open to 
 talent even in the humblest station, in putting the highest 
 place in Christendom within reach of the poorest aspirant, 
 the Church rendered, as we have akeady noticed, the grandest 
 service to medifeval society. 
 
 A churchman in deacon's orders young Becket became. 
 An ecclesiastic in minor orders was a clerk in name only. 
 He coi^ld hold ecclesiastical preferment, and Becket was a 
 great pluralist, like all influential churchmen in that day. 
 The clerk could also, however, lie a soldier, a statesman, a 
 lawyer, or anything else of fair reputation that he pleased. 
 Becket had gained some knowledge of knightly accomplish- 
 ments in the house of a Xorman noble, Pdcher of Laigle ; 
 and he afterwards acquitted himself more than creditably 
 in the field. On his return from France we find him in 
 the office of a relative, one Master Osbem Eightpenny, a 
 citizen of London of the highest position and influence, not 
 with the citizens only but with their superiors. He was 
 perhaps a sheriff; at any rate we find Becket at this time 
 in the ofifice of the sheriffs or portreeves, where he no 
 doubt got a good insight into public affairs. Here was a 
 man who for a citizen's son had had a remarkably varied 
 as well as complete education ; and had been brought into 
 fruitful contact with the various activities of his time. His 
 
APPOINTED CHANCELLOE. 187 
 
 father Gilbert had some sort of friendship with Theobald 
 the Archbishop of Canterbiuy. Gilbert was from llouen ; 
 and Theobald was the third archbishop whom the celebrated 
 Norman monastery of Bee had given to the world. Their 
 acquaintance was probably formed there. Indeed ' Bee ' = 
 ' brook ' — is probably at the root of Becket's name. 
 
 Becket was introduced to the service of the Archbishop, 
 with whom he became an immense favourite. Twice he 
 seems to have been sent by the Primate to Home. The 
 question of the succession to Stephen was causing deep 
 anxiety. He wished to have his son Eustace crowned. 
 Becket seems to have hindered it by suggesting that it 
 could not take place without the consent of the Pope. 
 This is important to the understanding of his subsequent 
 position. He had already, before he passed into Henry's ser- 
 ^ ice, formed a high idea of the Papal prerogative ; he was in 
 the serx'ice of the Church first and was naturally led to take 
 the Church view of affairs ; and further it is evident that, 
 young as he was, he was trusted with important and diffi- 
 cult missions, and exercised a strong influence in favour of 
 Henry's right to the crown. The Archbishop made him an 
 archdeacon ; but shortly afterwards on the coronation of 
 Henry II. he recommended him as chancellor to the young 
 King. Nothing can shew more strongly the opinion which 
 was formed of the capacity of Becket, than that he should 
 thus have been recommended l)y the Archbishop and 
 accepted by the sovereign. The truth is that he and the 
 King were congenial spirits ; both of them consummately 
 able men, and both determined that order shoirld reign in 
 the land. The chancellor is now the first lay subject, then 
 he was but fourth or fifth ; but being always about the 
 King, and having the management of the whole royal 
 })ati'onHge, the chancellor was practically the most influential 
 pei'son in the realm. Henry and Becket conceived the 
 
188 ST. THOMAS OF CANTERBURY. 
 
 warmest attachment to each other, and lived on terms of 
 the most intimate familiarity. A man of Becket's capacity 
 and determination was invaluable to the King ; and his 
 chancellorship marks a very distinct and important era in 
 the development of the realm. 
 
 The reign of Henry 11., it is now well understood, was 
 the critical point in the evolution of our political institu- 
 tions ; it was then that the constitutional monarchy began 
 to be. Henry when he came to the throne had almost to 
 reconquer his realm. We can read ample evidence in the 
 chronicles of the time, of the terrible condition to which 
 the wars of Stephen's reign had reduced the country. 
 Stephen had filled the land with Flemish mercenaries ; and 
 had allowed his barons to build some of the . strongest 
 castles in Europe, from which they tyrannised at will. The 
 land was rapidly falling into the condition of France, in 
 which the great vassals were stronger than the King. The 
 misery of the country was so dire that John of Salisbury 
 compares it to that of Jerusalem when besieged by Titus. 
 Henry II., who had been knighted by David his great uncle 
 the King of Scots, succeeded to this inheritance of anarchy, 
 and set himself at work at once to bring his land into order. 
 Within a brief space the Flemings had to depart, the castles 
 were destroyed, and the realm was restored. Henry was but 
 21, but his ability and vigour carried everything before him, 
 and within a year he had reduced every great baron to 
 subjection, and made his people understand that he meant 
 to reign. In all this he found an able coadjutor in Becket, 
 with whom he crossed the channel in 1156 to make the 
 same order in ITormandy which he had made at home. 
 
 The attempt has been made to represent Becket's conduct 
 in the chancellorship as tyrannou.s and brutal in the extreme. 
 No doubt he struck hard, but always at the enemies of the 
 State. His administration was evidently masterly, and all 
 
MASTERLY ADMINISTRATION. 189 
 
 people blessed him for the order which he restored. The 
 testimony is clear and explicit that he enjoyed the highest 
 favour with all classes ; clergy, knights, commons, all agreed 
 to look upon him with equal good will. His work, for we 
 must give him the credit of a full share in the changes 
 which signalised the earlier and best years of Henry's reign, 
 was no less than the transformation of a State wherein 
 the feudal order or disorder reigned supreme, into a compact 
 and powerful monarchy, in which something more than the 
 first rudiments of a Constitution began to appear. Henry 
 developed the system of administration by skilled officials, 
 who from his day manage more and more the affairs of 
 State ; while the great hereditary offices became confined to 
 the household. He organised on a very complete basis the 
 administration of justice, and did much to establish the 
 system of trial, which is one of the glories of our State, and 
 a sure safeguard of the liberties of the people. Havuig a 
 distant war on hand at Toulouse in 1159, he set on foot a 
 scheme of money payment — scutage — instead of personal 
 •military service, whereby he was able to carry on the war 
 with hired soldiers, strikins; at the same time a severe blow 
 at the independence of the vassals of the crown, and intro- 
 ducing a new and fruitful principle into the management 
 of military affairs. 
 
 In all these great steps of progress we may be sure that 
 we can trace the work of Becket's hand. About the last, 
 and certainly not the least important, we know that it was 
 mainly his work. In truth Becket was a masterly man of 
 affairs, and during his In-ief administration he made the 
 chancellorship the most important office in the realm. He 
 was a born statesman, but he was only an ecclesiastical 
 saint. His whole nature went spontaneously into the duties 
 and toils of the one vocation ; he had to force his nature 
 to make even a decent success in the other. Henry spoiled 
 
190 ST. THOMAS OF CANTERBURY. 
 
 a very able coadjutor in his really noble life-work when he 
 gave him the archbishopric ; but as he had made him arch- 
 bishop really as a stroke of statecraft — in the hope that 
 he would thereby secure, in the Primacy, if not a pliant 
 tool at any rate a man who would take a secular view of 
 spiritual afiairs — we have no need to spend much pity upon 
 him, when he found that he had exalted to the Primate's 
 throne, one who proved himself the most imperious of 
 ecclesiastics. 
 
 A writer of the time draws an almost idyllic picture of 
 the state of England after a very few years of Becket's 
 rule as chancellor. It must not be taken too literally ; 
 but still there can be no doubt that he restored order and 
 developed progress in the State, in a very effective manner. 
 Had he remained at the head of affairs it is probable that 
 he would have left one of the greatest names in our secular 
 history ; and he might so have consolidated the pohtical 
 order as to have spared some of the bloody struggles through 
 which, in after generations, it had to light its way. His 
 great fault in his secular administration was a certain vulgar 
 love of mere splendour and pomp of state. In intellectual 
 gifts he towered, like Saul, a head and shoulders above his 
 contemporaries ; and being by nature vain and ostentatious, 
 he was somewhat dazzled by his sudden rise from obscurity 
 to power. He delighted in a sumptuous e.stablishment, in 
 troops of menials, in a great following of retainers. When 
 he went as the king's envoy to Paris, he filled the French- 
 men with amazement at the magnificence of his appointments, 
 and the lavish bounty of his gifts. There was policy here 
 no doubt. Henry was the most powerful monarch in 
 Europe, while for some of his domains he was vassal to the 
 French king. Becket, from motives of State policy, may 
 have been very desirous to impress the Frenchmen with the 
 resources and splendour of his master's kingdom ; b\it there 
 
THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION. 191 
 
 can be no question that the parade was grateful to his 
 vanity, and that he played the peacock with all his heart. 
 
 This was the weak side of Becket's character all through. 
 He was too self-conscious ; too much occupied with the effect 
 that he was producing. He posed for the part which he 
 had to play too dramatically ; and that is never the weak- 
 ness of the noblest and loftiest men. Becket was not in 
 the first rank ; he was not a man like St. Louis — a saint 
 of as pure and lofty a type as St. Bernard yet moving 
 through life by choice in the secular sphere, and mingling 
 with keen interest in the congress of the great world's 
 affairs. His place was however very high in the second 
 rank, and it is impossible to think lightly of him ; he was 
 ceitainly no mere actor, no hypocrite ; always there was a 
 clear, consistent, resolute purpose behind his actions, though 
 there were times when he shewed some tremor ; his main 
 aim was to do what seemed to him his clear duty in his 
 office, as the best service which he could render to mankind. 
 A man who went so calmly and firndy to his death at last 
 must be credited with something higher than selfish schem- 
 ing in the earlier stages of his career. 
 
 Now comes the great transformation. In the year 1161 
 Archbishop Theobald, Becket's early patron, died. In 1162 
 Becket was elected, virtually by the King's command, to the 
 vacant see. The brilliant chancellor became the stern and 
 scrupulous archbishop, and remained the most noted man in 
 Europe, untU his martyrdom made him one of the most 
 noted men of the world. The present object is not to re- 
 capitulate the facts of a story which is very well known, 
 and is easily accessible in the pages of any tolerable history. 
 Our concern is with the right interpretn.tion of the facts, and 
 of the principles at stake on either side, in order that we may 
 understand their true bearing both on the actors in this great 
 tragedy, and on the welfare and progress of the State. 
 
192 ST. THOMAS OF CANTERBURY. 
 
 Perhaps the strongest charge against Becket, and that 
 which weighs most against him in the popular mind, was 
 that he treated the King, who had placed him generously 
 by his own act in the highest ecclesiastical position in 
 Europe next to the Papal throne, with signal ingratitude ; 
 the King placed him there as a friend, and a man of secular 
 mind, to make things pleasant between State and Church, 
 while he embittered their relations to the utmost of his 
 power. It seems tolerably clear that as chancellor Becket 
 had been strongly anti-clerical. He was called ' a despiser 
 of the clergy ' ; and Foliot objected to him as a ' persecutor 
 and destroyer of Holy Church.' Henry hoped that he worUd 
 carry his secular spirit with him to Canterbury, and as 
 Primate play into the hands of the King. Henry, like all 
 secular princes in those days, and all secular premiers in 
 ours, had a dread of the churchman's conscience. It is 
 about the most troublesome thing upon earth this conscience 
 towards God. Ahab once remarked on it to this effect to 
 Elijah ; but it has, nevertheless, been as the salt of the 
 earth and the light of the world. 
 
 Henry was simply furious when he saw the pleasant, 
 practical, worldly-minded Becket cast in a moment the 
 slough of his worldly habits, and stand forth the very 
 image of the conscientious churchman, impracticable to 
 the backbone, with a vision of martyrdom as the appro- 
 priate en d to his career. But the reason of this trans- 
 formation it is not difficult to trace. Becket was one to 
 carry out completely any part which he might find himself 
 called on to enact. The King had misread his man. 
 His devotion to the King as chancellor, was the way to 
 make the chancellorship a power ; to bring out all its 
 possibilities, and to make it a position in which a man 
 of large capacity might find full exercise for his highest 
 faculties. To be the King's man and second all his 
 
THE POWERFUL ECCLESIASTIC. 193 
 
 designs for the unity and welfare of the realm, was the 
 thing for an able and upright chancellor to do. When 
 the archbishopric was forced upon him he saw at a 
 glance that to be the King's man as Primate, would be 
 to clothe himself with weakness, and cover himself with 
 shame. He had been an ecclesiastic, we must remember, 
 before he had been chancellor. He saw the position 
 from the ecclesiastical point of view ; he knew, as the 
 King could not know, what it demanded, and in accepting 
 it he accepted, not a splendid position, a large income, 
 and unbounded adulation, but the part which it was 
 becoming that the Primate of all England at that time 
 should play. "We may well believe that when this 
 flashed on him, his generous heart was touched by the 
 thought of all the sorrow that must grow out of his 
 appointment to the King ; and there is e^ddence that 
 either in jest or earnest he warned him of it. l^one the 
 less did his hand close firmly on the crosier, when Henry, 
 taking no heed to his warning, forced it on his acceptance, 
 and in a moment he became a new man ; assumed, not a 
 new nature, for he was the same Becket all through, but 
 a new conception of duty, of the work which he had to 
 do ; and this conception he held with unflinching flrmness 
 till death. 
 
 There is no doubt that this power to throw himself 
 entirely into two so opposite parts or schemes of life, 
 detracts a good deal from his moral grandeur ; saint and 
 martyr though he was, there was a lack of that inner 
 simplicity and highmindedness which in St. Bernard or 
 St. Louis would have forbidden them to attempt anything 
 but the one thing which they beheved they had been set 
 to do by a higher hand. These men who can play two 
 such different parts with such consummate power are 
 only in the second rank, never in the first ; ' one thhig 
 
194 ST. THOMAS OF CANTEEBUBY. 
 
 I do,' is the word of the loftiest spirits. This instant 
 apprehension by Becket of the true role which it became 
 him as Primate to assume, as a man under higher duty 
 to God than to the King, was at any rate a far nobler 
 thing than if he had been content to play the contemptible 
 part of a secular churchman, letting the King have his 
 way at will in Church as well as ia State. Becket, made 
 archbishop, was every inch an archbishop, and resolved 
 at once that his supreme duty was to the Church and not 
 to the King. Nothing but respect is due to that decision. 
 In those days it would have been an unspeakable loss to 
 civilisation had the Church as well as the State fallen 
 helpless into the monarch's hands. Chancellors were 
 generally rewarded with a bishopric, but then they 
 resigned their chancellorships. The Primacy was quite 
 another matter. The Primate was the counterweight to 
 the Crown, and under the Conqueror and his son Eufus, 
 he had done noble ser%'ice by the strength of his restrain- 
 ing hand. It would have been a terrible thing for 
 England had there been no Lanfranc or Anselm to plead 
 the cause of righteousness and mercy, with these able but 
 brutal monarchs on whom no other moral restraint could 
 have been imposed. Had Becket consented to hold both 
 offices as the King's man, he would simply have betrayed 
 the best interests of the country as well as of the Church. 
 Henry was a masterly ruler, but a stem one ; and he 
 had in him not only the brutality of his mother's house, 
 but the devilish tincture of his father's. The kind of 
 restraint under which a vigorous and high-minded prelate 
 would place him would have been greatly for his good, 
 and the good of his country. It is however characteristic 
 of Becket that the work to which his sense of duty, and 
 doubtless his ambition also, prompted him, he must do in 
 the most arrogant, offensive, and imperious way. Through 
 
REFOEM OP CHURCH ABUSES. 195 
 
 the whole controversy his faults of temper were conspicuous. 
 He seems to have striven to make the King understand how 
 entirely he himself had broken with the past, and how httle 
 Henry had to hope at his hands. He wielded his crook 
 just as he had used his seals, to make them the most 
 effective instruments of power ; and by this he at once 
 satisfied his own large but not base ambition, and sought 
 what he honestly believed to be the public good. 
 
 Appointed to the Primacy he immediately commenced 
 to make such order in the Church's realm as he had 
 already made in the secular polity. There were the direst 
 irregularities in the estate of the Church, which needed 
 to be corrected, and usurpations demanding both the chas- 
 tisement of the offender and the exaction of restitution. 
 Becket set at once about the correction in the most imperious 
 and uncompromising spirit. His eveiy act whether legally 
 right or wrong — to discuss that would be a long question — 
 was like a challenge ; a defiance to the King as from a rival 
 throne. For reasons which have been explained we need 
 feel no great pity for Henry. The tone of Becket and the 
 animus of , his proceedings from the first deserve however 
 to be severely condemned. He thought only of the 
 Church, and not at all of the realm, and acted so as to 
 make a fair compromise impossible. His commanding 
 powers and his personal influence with Henry, gave him a 
 great opportunity of settling these vexed questions on a 
 basis which would have been just alike to Church and 
 State. He showed, hovever, not the faintest disposition so 
 to settle them, but took the extreme Church ground from 
 the first. 
 
 It was the Church ground, notice, that he took. Becket 
 was not fighting for the Pope, and the Pope did little to 
 help him. Poor Alexander III. had an Antipope backed 
 by the emperor. He was in sore straits lest he shoiild 
 
196 ST. THOMAS OF CANTERBURY. 
 
 offend Henry, and throw all the strength of England into 
 the cause of his rival. So he trimmed and temporised, 
 wishing in his heart probably as devoutly as Henry, that 
 this terrible archbishop was out of the way. Indeed he 
 seemed to Becket to fall so far short of common Christian 
 courage and uprightness, that he wrote, ' At Eome it is 
 always the same. Barabbas is let go, and Christ crucified. 
 Come what may, I will never submit ; but I will trouble 
 the Church of Eome no more.' Thorough and hearty 
 Englishman as he had been, the thought of what was 
 good for England never seems to have crossed him ; only 
 what was good for Holy Church. It was no doubt better 
 in the long run that he should have played the part of 
 an arrogant churchman than of a worldly-minded truckling 
 Primate ; for what England most sorely needed, not for 
 that moment only but for coming generations, was a power 
 which should make monarchs feel that they had a monarch, 
 and might not dare to play the tyrant at will. But there 
 was a nobler part than either, which Becket did not play ; 
 perhaps which he was not great enough to play, — the part 
 of the churchman who cared supremely for the best 
 interests of the realm. 
 
 There can be no question, at any rate, that it was his 
 firm and imperious demeanour before the King, which won 
 the passionate admiration and devotion of the people. 
 The secular power pinched them in those days fearfully 
 hard ; and this man who dared to beard the King in the 
 name of a higher King, was a champion and a hero in 
 their sight. At JSTorthampton they thronged around him 
 and attended him to his monastery with wild enthusiasm ; 
 and when he landed for the last time in England and 
 entered it, as he may have known, to die, his progresses 
 everywhere were triumphal processions ; ' all the world 
 went after him,' and his hold on the popular heart caused 
 
THE STEUGGLE WITH THE KING. 197 
 
 serious alarm to those who ruled the State. Henry and 
 Becket had met again and again in hope of reconciliation ; 
 but always one thing stood in the way. Becket always 
 made open or secret reservation of ' the rights of the 
 Church; or ' the honour of his God,' and Henry felt it ; 
 when he heard the dreaded phrase, ' Saving the honour of 
 my God,' he broke forth into furious imprecations. He 
 knew that there was a rock there against which both his 
 passion and his force might spend themselves in vain. 
 Alas ! that the rights of the Church and the rights of 
 the State in a world which Christ came to save, should 
 be so constantly paraded as opposing powers ! Alas ! 
 that man's pride, ambition and avarice have in all ages 
 marred so miserably the benediction which the Saviour 
 brought to mankind ! 
 
 The history of the Constitutions of Clarendon is quite too 
 large and intricate a matter to be treated in a brief lecture. 
 We may simply note that in the Constitutions, the right of 
 the King's court over criminal ecclesiastics was recognised, 
 and Becket in some way was induced to accept them, though 
 probably with a mental reservation, ' subject to the dispen- 
 sation of the Church.' He bitterly repented his acquiescence, 
 and the whole struggle of his life from that time was to 
 recover for the Church the position which he felt that he had 
 weakly betrayed. His long exile and his return in something 
 like a popular whirlwind of triumph are familiar matters of 
 history. He knew, probably, that he was returning to die. 
 He was solemnly warned before he embarked that he would 
 be certainly slain. ' It is of no consequence to me,' he 
 answered, 'for if I am torn limb from limb I will go.' 
 
 He returned with a battery of suspensions and anathemas 
 which he discharged at his enemies. Tt was to be war to 
 the death; andLjve may conjecture that Becket saw his 
 death might triumph where his life had failed./ Warnings 
 
198 ST. THOMAS OF CANTEEBUEY. 
 
 and omens were abundant. ^^ Archbishop, 'ware the knife, 
 Archbishop, 'ware the knife^ shrieked a woman in the crowd 
 that met him at Southwark. He foretold his fate to the 
 abbot of St. Albans and returned to Canterbury to die. 
 Then Henry, alarmed at the tales of the popular enthusiasm 
 which reached him in Normandy, spoke those hasty pas- 
 sionate words which sent forth the murderers on their work 
 of doom. Becket bore himseK altogether nobly when he 
 saw that the fatal hour had come. All the strength and 
 dignity of the man came forth when he gathered up his 
 courage and firmness to die. On the steps of an altar in 
 his cathedral church they assailed him. Becket forbade his 
 monks to exclude them,- ' I came here not to resist,' he 
 said, ' but to suffer.' They attacked him with great brutality, 
 but they could not drag him from the church. Then, fearing 
 rescue, they struck him down where he stood, and with 
 the words, ' I am ready to die for the name of Jesus and 
 the protection of His Church,' he fell. 
 
 He died, remember, the martyr of the Church, and not of 
 Clrrist, or of mankind. But he died nobly, in what he believed 
 to be a sacred cause ; and the world justly keeps its high 
 honour for the man who is ready to set to Iris hfe-struggle 
 the seal of his death. Its highest honour it reserves for men 
 hke Bernard and Francis, and that pure and lofty spirit — the 
 secular saint, St. Louis of France, whose pure simplicity and 
 unwx)rldliness make the glory of an arrogant and ambitious 
 churchman hke Becket look dim. Becket's death won for 
 Irim the triumph for which he had struggled in life in vain. 
 All know the tale of Henry's penance at the tomb of the 
 martyr. The dark deed, the murder of the brave archbishop 
 before an altar of his own cathedral, filled Europe with horror. 
 Henry was, or professed to be, crushed by remorse. Henry 
 grovelling a day and a night before the tomb m tears and 
 prayers, and scourged by Becket's monks, is a spectacle 
 
THE GAIN FOR ENGLAND. 199 
 
 which means much not for Henry himself only, but for 
 English history. The happy thing for England is that 
 neither conquered, or both, in the long strife. Becket died 
 under the murderer's sword; Henry prostrated himself in 
 humiliation and shame before his grave ; but ' benefit of 
 clergy' became a shield from the injustice and brutality of 
 the law, until the King's courts had learnt some precious 
 lessons ; and then the whole administration of the law passed, 
 as it was bound to pass, under secular control. 
 
 Be sure that the lesson of Henry's humiliation was not lost 
 on monarchs. It drove home into their consciences the con- 
 viction that they were but the regents on earth of a higher 
 King. And so when the secular power had learnt lessons of 
 justice and mercy, and the spiritual power true reverence for 
 the secular life, the commonwealth of Great Britain, for Scot- 
 land has taken full share in both the conflict and the triumph, 
 came to master both the tyrannies which were struggling then 
 to play the despot over her life. It is the blending of the 
 two principles for which Becket and Henry stood, and not 
 the separate victory of either of them, which lends such 
 strength and dignity to our English freedom. And it is 
 because men like Becket and Henry have not been wanting 
 in any age of our history, because there have always been 
 men who have dared to stand even to death for each side of 
 that dual principle, which ia its duahty men call secular and 
 sacred but which in its unity constitutes the true grandeur 
 and glory of States, "that the life of the English nation has 
 developed in such fair and stately proportions, and has become 
 the largest, the noblest, the strongest, and the freest in the 
 world. 
 
VIII. 
 
 ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI, AND THE RISE OF THE 
 MENDICANT ORDERS. 
 
VIII. 
 
 ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI, AND THE RISE OF THE 
 MENDICANT ORDERS. 
 
 1182—1226. 
 
 In passing from the career of St. Thomas of Canterbury 
 to that of St. Francis of Assisi, we leave the sphere of 
 ecclesiastial statesmanship, and enter once more the sphere 
 of the religious life. St. Francis was saint pure and simple 
 after his fashion ; St. Bernard was saint pure and simple 
 after another and a larger though not a higher fashion ; St. 
 Thomas of Canterbury was saint distinctly for a purpose, 
 and was always at heart an able, ambitious, and resolute 
 ruler of men. St. Bernard, as we have seen, entered the 
 world, where he was the most powerful man of his time, 
 with much sorrow and reluctance, while his heart remained- 
 always faithful to his beloved Clairvaulx ; St. Prancis, and 
 the men of the order which he founded, entered the world 
 much more freely than St. Bernard, and with a much more 
 hearty feeling that it was there that their work lay ; and 
 this was a very remarkable change, may we not say 
 progress, in the idea of the saintly life, the causes of which 
 we must now proceed to examine. 
 
 X There were, however, in those times, two ways of ' entering 
 the world.' St. Thomas had lived in the world, but he 
 lived in it as a man of the world, and the battle of his 
 life to maintain the privileges of his order, was, as we have 
 learned, a purely mundane battle. 
 
204 ST. FRANCIS OP ASSISI 
 
 It is in a far different sense that we can say of St. 
 Francis that his life was passed in the world. His 
 interests were of another kind altogether, The battles of 
 systems and orders, the contests of rough kings and 
 haughty churchmen, ruffle not the quiet serenity of his 
 soul. We are back again in the calm region of saintly 
 aspiration, a region of pure and earnest endeavour to live 
 hke Chi-ist, to receive and radiate again the influences of 
 His life, and to bring the powers of the spiritual sphere to 
 bear on mankind. These powers of the spiritual sphere 
 were not such powers as Innocent III. wielded, when, in 
 what he believed to be a holy, a spiritual war, he went 
 flaming with fire and sword through Languedoc, and 
 stamped out heresy with the iron heel of the chivalry of 
 Europe. The man whose life we have now before us 
 aimed at the mastery of no such instruments. It is 
 probable that he would have shuddered at them, for he was 
 one of the humblest and gentlest of men. His only 
 weapons were the purely spiritual weapons of example and 
 persuasion. He sought by living and preaching to act on 
 his fellows, and he cared for no other results than these 
 would win. This is why we find ourselves now in another 
 region than that into which the life of a great ecclesiastical 
 statesman can usher us ; when we turn to St. Francis, 
 and his mistress, holy Poverty, we are among the saints 
 again, and close to the vital springs of the power of the 
 Church. 
 
 Becket exercised a tremendous influence and Innocent III. 
 wielded the same power yet more royally. He made him- 
 self absolute Lord of Christendom, and kings of great 
 nations did homage to him for their crowns. But it was 
 such men as St. Bernard and St. Francis who made the 
 Beckets and the Innocents possible. It was the saints, the 
 holy unworldly men, who furnished the standing ground for 
 
POWER OF THE SAINTLY LIFE. 205 
 
 Primates and Popes. The force which was directed by the 
 hands of an Innocent, and which in his hands shook the 
 strongest realms in Christendom to their very centre, was 
 gathered by the lives of men like Bernard and Prancis, 
 whom the common people could, in their inmost hearts, 
 reverence and adore. The word ' spiritual ' covered all 
 Becket's, Alexander's and Innocent's doings ; though much 
 of their work was begun, continued, and ended in selfish 
 passion, in the effort after a dominion which was none the 
 less worldly because it called itself by the most .sacred name. 
 But this word ' spiritual ' had power with the people 
 because there were living in Europe and before their eyes 
 those who realised their purest imagination of what a 
 spiritual man should be like, what life he should live, what 
 work he should do. Worldly men might wield the power, 
 but only unworldly men could create it. Unless in each 
 generation such men as these had appeared, to renew that 
 faith of men in the reality of purity, righteousness, humility, 
 and truth, which the ecclesiastical policy and conduct of 
 the Eoman Church did its very best to destroy, the whole 
 system must have perished of its own corruption. The 
 Church died daily of its Priests and Popes, and was daily 
 saved by its Saints. A life like that of St. Bernard and 
 St. Francis gave it new centuries of existence, because it 
 kept some reality that was Christlike, or was honestly 
 taken to be Christlike, before the eyes of men. When 
 saints iDecame scarcer, Eome became feebler. When all 
 were seeking their own, none the things of Jesus Christ, in 
 the high places of the Church, the Pteformation was born. 
 Innocent III. saw in a vision the figure of this poor 
 emaciated squalid monk St. Francis, supporting the great 
 Basilica of the Lateran ; and he was right. If no great 
 priest of poverty, humility, and charity, Iiad arisen in that 
 age to revive the hearts and the hopes of men, the splendid 
 
206 ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 
 
 imperial policy of its great Pope, Innocent III., would have 
 been branded as heathen and cast out as hateful by every 
 true Christian heart. But men v?ere little critical in those 
 days ; Innocent adopted St. Prancis ; the virtues and graces 
 of the saint were credited to the system, and fed its 
 authority from a fresh spring. 
 
 St. Francis was born in 1182, and his youth was spent 
 in the early years of that thirteenth century, which is the 
 next great era in human progress to the apostolic age. It 
 ends the mediaeval, and begins the modern epoch. Since the 
 establishment of the Eoman Empire, and the advent of the 
 Lord into the bosom of the Universal Society which Eome 
 had founded and whose unity she guarded with her shield, 
 there had been no movement for the progress of humanity 
 comparable in its importance with the rise of a national life, 
 a national monarchy, a national language and a national 
 literature in all the great countries of the "West. The age 
 of this momentous development of the national spirit in 
 the West of Europe is the thirteenth century, and it is the 
 great landmark of history between the establishment of the 
 Eoman Empire in the first century, and the French 
 Eevolution in the eighteenth. One of the most remarkable 
 features in the movement of this thirteenth century is the 
 development of a vernacular literature. Scholars then 
 began to use the language which was understood by the 
 people, instead of the Latin which was understood only, in 
 the main, by the priests. The result of this was an 
 immense enlargement, not of the knowledge only, but of 
 the interests, the concernments, of the mass of the people. 
 They began feebly and dimly, but very really, to take an 
 interest in matters which till then had been held to be 
 quite above their sphere. Educated men found the common 
 language sufficiently perfected to become the vehicle of 
 their ideas. The poor and ignorant folk began to have 
 
GROWTH OF THE POPULAR ELEMENT. 207 
 
 thoughts of their own about politics, about the conduct of 
 life, and even about theology ; they began to be critics in 
 their own dull way ; it is true they knew but a little, yet 
 they exercised this knowledge as an instrument for the 
 acquisition of more. A free circulation of thought began, 
 and though it was very feeble and very slow, it was the 
 origin of the movement which culminated in one direction 
 in the Teutonic Eeformation, and in the other in the French 
 Eevolution. Both of these really have their springs in the 
 thirteenth century, when thought freed itself from the two 
 main grooves, the classical and ecclesiastical, in which for 
 centuries it had travelled, and went forth in vernacular 
 freedom to find what entertainment it might in humble 
 human homes and hearts. 
 
 The consequent rise of secular life in dignity and import- 
 ance is the broadest fact of the thirteenth century. The 
 great saint of the middle of the century, St. Louis, is a 
 layman, a thorough layman, and that means much. The 
 Crusades had greatly stimulated the growth of the popular 
 mind, and the development of the popular estate ; commerce, 
 knowledge, and great purposes which the poorest and the 
 richest equally shared, had elevated the population of the 
 chief European kingdoms ; and from that time men of the 
 people began to take, not an accidental, but a constant and 
 recognised part in the conduct of public affairs. As secular 
 life grew larger and took in a wider field, it would 
 inevitably assert its right to something of that sanctity 
 which till that time had been supposed to attach to the 
 religious life alone. Two centuries earlier a man so holy 
 as St. Louis would have been almost driven into a cloister ; 
 in the thirteenth century he could feel that holiness had a 
 wide field of influence even in the most eminent places of 
 the world. Questions of morals, of religion, had their interest 
 for secular men, and were dealt with apart frona the mere 
 
208 ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 
 
 authority of their spiritual guides. Men would be think- 
 ing about the deepest problems of life under the monarch's 
 crown, the soldier's helmet, the scholar's cap, as well as 
 under the monk's cowl ; nor would the peasant be quite 
 shut out from interest in what king, soldier, and scholar 
 felt had come within their sphere. On many subjects 
 which till then had been the exclusive concern of church- 
 men, the appeal would be thenceforth to the secular 
 judgment, and unless the Church could win the homage of 
 the secular intellect to her presentation of truth, there was 
 some likelihood that she would sink down into a mere 
 directress of devotion. Truth must come out of the schools 
 and frequent the forum ; the Church must throw herself 
 into the thick of the intellectual and moral controversies 
 which this breaking forth of the secular life into freedom 
 and honour would inevitably generate, and must either hold 
 her own by superior intellectual power, or else retire from 
 the headship of the movement, and leave the secular spirit 
 in the world of political, intellectual, and martial strife, 
 to run into extravagance at will. If all that was most 
 spiritual in the Church should continue to withdraw itself 
 and hide itself in the cloister from all contact with the 
 world, very plainly the world and the Church would cease 
 to comprehend and to act upon each other, and civilisation 
 would miss that inestimable advantage which their close 
 relation and interpenetration alone would secure. A new 
 idea of sainthness, or rather a new form of it, and a 
 new view of its relation to the world, were imperatively 
 demanded. We shall see how these were supplied. 
 
 M. Michelet says, in his rapid brilliant way of disposing 
 of the characteristics of an era, that Innocent III. used 
 the Mendicant Orders to prop up the tottering Church. 
 That seems to imply in Innocent an altogether clearer 
 discernment of the special character of a time, than any 
 
AN AGE OF TRANSITION. 209 
 
 man living in it would be likely to possess. We must 
 not credit even the ablest men living in an age, with that 
 insight into its character and tendencies which our own 
 more remote perspective affords to us. The Mendicant 
 Orders forced themselves on the Papacy. It was very 
 unwiEingly, very doubtfully, that the Eoman Church 
 accepted their aid. The truer account of the matter seems 
 to be, that they grew out of the necessities of the times, of 
 which neither they, nor the Eoman Church, were very fully 
 conscious. The times and they grew together out of one 
 root. It is only on looking back over the gulf of ages 
 that we can see how wonderfully they fitted each other, 
 and how the new Orders served to prolong (on the whole 
 greatly to the advantage of Europe) the influence of the 
 Church on the formative movement which was then beginning 
 to gather force in all the great European kingdoms of the 
 West. 
 
 At the time when this grand stir began through all the 
 spheres of secular society — a movement of humanity at 
 large up to a higher line of thought and life, a movement 
 of which a great layman, St. Louis, was to be the con- 
 secrating priest, and a greater layman, Dante, was to be 
 the poet and seer — two men appear upon the scene, who 
 show at once, though differing very widely from each other, 
 a most remarkable adaptation to those special features and 
 needs of the times, which we can see clearly enough, but 
 which could have been only very dimly discerned by the 
 men who were active in those times, and who partly were 
 made by them, and partly made them. 
 
 St. Dominic and St. Francis now take their place upon 
 the stage. St. Dominic was born in 1170, St. Erancis in 
 1182. They both play their part in the world during the 
 first half of the thirteenth century. Dominic died in 1221, 
 
210 ST. FB-ANCIS OF ASSIST. 
 
 Francis in 1226. The first quarter of the century we may- 
 say witnessed the commencement and the close of their 
 labours, but they left behind them, when they died, two 
 numerous and powerful Orders, which soon gathered into 
 their fellowship some of the ablest scholars and administra- 
 tors in Europe, and for two centuries wielded the chief 
 spiritual and intellectual power in the "Western World. 
 Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus on the one side, 
 and Duns Scotus and Eoger Bacon on the other, were 
 four of the very ablest men in the annals of the Scholastic 
 Philosophy, and they are but the foremost of a long hue of 
 illustrious men whom the Mendicant Orders trained for the 
 highest service of mankind. 
 
 The two Orders had different spheres, but they had this 
 in common ; they went into the world. Their votaries 
 had vowed to go about and mingle with their fellows; as 
 preachers, as scholars, as administrators, they sought out 
 the most frequented highways of the world, and there they 
 brought their influence and the influence of the Church to 
 bear on men. They became as Dr. Milman justly observes, 
 ' a kind of Papal militia, always mobilized, ready to be 
 moved hither and thither at the Papal will.' Again, 
 however, we must guard ourselves from supposing that this 
 tendency to mix with men and take their saintliness down 
 into the world, was the fruit of any deep laid scheme of 
 influence. St. Francis had sore struggles of spirit before 
 he could discern which was the path of saintly duty, the 
 life of the recluse or the life of the missionary ; and when 
 he finally elected the latter, he was but obeying uncon- 
 sciously a certain spirit of the age which was in him, and 
 with little prevision of the momentous importance of his 
 decision to the highest interests of the Church. 
 
 St. Francis was born at Assisi, a picturesque little town 
 among the Umbrian hills, the son of Pietro Bernardone, a 
 
YOUTHFUL CHARACTERISTICS. 211 
 
 thriving merchant not without pretension to noble blood, 
 and he seems to have been a youth of brilliant promise. 
 John was his baptismal name, but his father had much 
 trafiic with Frenchmen, and made his son a thorough 
 French scholar, and it is said that from this circumstance 
 he derived the appellation which he has made illustrious 
 in the annals of the world. He was a general favourite, 
 gay, brilliant, lavish, though clever and assiduous in 
 business, and high expectations of his future were enter- 
 tained by his father. And not unjustly, for he was born 
 for greatness, though of a kind of which his father little 
 dreamed ; and some evidence of his remarkable power must 
 have been apparent to all who had an eye to discern 
 spirits, even in his prodigal days. From the first, however, 
 we are told, even when he was wildest and most wanton, he 
 had a quick eye and a tender heart for the necessities of 
 the poor. We have a picture of the man sketched by a 
 comrade : — 
 
 ' He was,' says his biographer, ' of a cheerful countenance and 
 kindly mien, free from both indolence and pride. His stature was of 
 the middle size inclining to smallness. He had a small and rounded 
 head, an oval face with forehead smooth and not large, black eyes 
 with no malevolence in them, straight eye-brows, straight and thin 
 nose, small pricked-up ears, sharp and ardent tougue, earnest and 
 sweet voice with clear and musical tones, white, equal, and compact 
 teeth, thin lips, little beard, slender neck, straight shoulders, short 
 arms, long fingers and nails, a poor leg, a small foot, tender skin, and 
 little or no flesh on his bones.' ^ 
 
 Long before the time which may be fixed on as the date 
 
 of his conversion, he reveals the tender and compassionate 
 
 nature to which he resigned at length the government of 
 
 his life. His ministry to the wretched began early. He 
 
 was ever ready to give an alms to the poor, but one day, 
 
 being much occupied, he sent one away without giving him 
 
 anything. Eeproaching himself immediately for his want of 
 
 'Thomas of Celano, Vita S. Fran., I. 10. in Acta Sanctorum, Oct. II. p. 706. 
 
212 ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 
 
 charity, he ran after the unfortunate man whom he had 
 refused and repaired his fault. He bound himself from that 
 time with a vow, to give an alms to all those who asked 
 it for the love of God; and he kept it faithfully till his 
 death. 
 
 Francis must have been endowed with an intensely sen- 
 sitive and sympathetic nature, open to impressions and 
 influences to an extent which to most of us would reach 
 the point of agony. Indeed it would not be too much to 
 say that his heart agonised over the sins and the sufferings 
 of mankind. From the time of his youth any spectacle of 
 distress not only tormented him, but so moved him that it 
 became a positive necessity to him to put forth his hand 
 to help and to save, no matter at what cost. A severe 
 illness, as with many of the great saints, was probably the 
 turning point in his life. On recovering from it he mounted 
 his horse and rode out to enjoy himself. Meeting a poor 
 gentleman, who had fallen into utter poverty and was 
 clothed in miserable rags, he was so touched by the sight 
 that he dismounted, stripped himself of everything, clothed 
 himself with the rags of the poor soldier, to whom he left 
 his own garments, and went light-hearted on his way. That 
 was the spirit of the man. He was of an impassioned, 
 imaginative, and highly mystical nature, with a wonderful 
 power of projecting his imaginings in forms which reacted 
 mightily on his own life. He was a man of visions ; he 
 lived in an atmosphere of marvels. Few poets have seen 
 such depths of beauty in the creation, and have felt so 
 vividly the kinship of all animate and inanimate things ; 
 while as the mystical devotee of the Crucified, the young 
 Bernardone gave himself up with all the passion of a lover 
 to the contemplation of the Saviour, and moulded his life 
 even to the minutest detail on the outward likeness of the 
 life of his adored Master. 
 
HIS FIRST VISION. 213 
 
 '^ The night after this adventure with the soldier Francis 
 saw a vision, and henceforth visions are the most important 
 part of the outward apparatus of his life. He beheld a 
 splendid palace filled with weapons, each having on it the 
 sign of the cross. On asking for whom they were provided 
 he was answered that they were ' for him and for his sol- 
 diers.' It is a sign of his perfect simplicity of heart that 
 he took this as a literal command to go forth to the wars. 
 Walter of Brienne was then fighting for the Italian cause 
 against the Emperor. He thought that that must be the 
 cause of Heaven ; so he armed himself, caring for nothing 
 but the heavenly commandment, and started off for the 
 Neapolitan States to offer his sword for the good fight. On 
 his way another vision arrested him. Bonaventura gives 
 the curious colloquy which ensued. ' Francis, who can do 
 the best for thee, a master or a servant ? a rich man or a 
 poor ? ' Francis answered that a lord and a rich man 
 could do the best for him ; another voice replied, ' Why 
 then leavest thou the Lord for a servant, and for a poor 
 man the rich God ? ' Francis submissively replied, ' Lord, 
 what wilt thou have me to do ? ' The Lord answered, 
 ' Return unto thy land, for the vision which thou hast 
 seen prefigures spiritvial and not human work, and should 
 have its fulfilment within.' At once with haste he returns 
 to Assisi, and waits there the word of the Lord.-'- 
 
 Not a spiritual person is he at present, or in any wise 
 separated from secular work, but a man who had all his 
 eyes and ears open to every sign which might come to 
 him from the world of spirit ; and who in such an age could 
 in the end devote himself to no other than spiritual work. 
 He was a young man of twenty-four when this critical vision 
 appeared. From that time he commenced to devote him- 
 self, with the intensity which always characterised him, to 
 1 S. Bonaventura, Vita S. Fran., c. 1. In Acta S.S., I.e. 
 
214 ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 
 
 religious exercises ; and he began to be conscious of earnest 
 longings after a more perfect and heavenly life, though how 
 to satisfy them remained hidden from his mental sight. 
 ' The will was present with him, but how to do he found 
 not.' It is to this period that the birth of his passion for 
 l^his bride, Poverty, is to be referred. It is said that he 
 returned to his worldly courses at Assisi, and that in the 
 midst of a revel, a shadow gathered over his face. ' Why 
 so sad, Francis,' cried one of his boon companions, ' Art 
 thou going to be married ? ' 'I am,' was the answer, ' and 
 to a lady of such wealth, and rank, and beauty, that the 
 world cannot produce her like.' He burst from the throng 
 to search for her, and ere long he held her in his em- 
 brace.-' The lady was Poverty — Holy Poverty — of whom he 
 always spoke as his bride, to whom he remained loyal 
 through life with a rare fidelity, and whom he held to be 
 the mother of the whole Order of Franciscan friars. This 
 was his manner, not of talking of it, but of realising it ; 
 thoughts with him easily became things. Still he was 
 searching for the way. His was a simple, childlike heart, 
 very unversed in the methods of the religionists ; all uncertain 
 as to what might be the acceptable way of fulfilling the 
 divine command, he was content if he could see only a 
 day's length of the journey before him, and was mostly 
 in sore perplexity and distress because he could not see 
 even that. 
 
 The stories of his literal interpretations of divine admoni- 
 tions would be almost laughable, but for the noble, toucliing 
 simplicity of spirit which they reveal. Here is a notable 
 instance. Wandering one day in the country, he went in 
 to pray in an _ old ruined church that was dedicated to 
 St. Damian. In his rapture he heard a voice from heaven, 
 ' Francis, arise and repair my house, which, as thou seest, 
 1 Vita S. Fran., Auctoribus Tribus Sociis, c. 1, in Acta S.S., I.e. 
 
FURY OP HIS FATHEE. 215 
 
 is wholly falling to destruction.' In his simplicity he 
 thought it was the poor old church of St. Damian which 
 he was to build up again, so he straightway goes home, 
 loads a horse with silks and stuffs, starts off for Folisno, 
 sells both horse and goods, returns to St. Damian and offers 
 the money as a free gift to the poor priest. The priest was 
 a wise man in his generation. Knowing Francis, and some- 
 thing probably too of the temper of the old Bernardone, 
 the father of the future saint, he refused the money, but 
 he gave the youth permission to remain with him. Francis 
 in scorn threw the money into a window, and when search 
 was soon after made for him by his father, he betook him- 
 self to a hiding place in a certain cellar where he lay quiet 
 seven days and prayed. Ashamed of his fears he soon after 
 resolved to return to the city. Squalid, dirty, in rags, pale 
 and emaciated by fasts, the citizens took him for a madman, 
 and pelted him with mud, filth, and stones. Francis walked 
 calmly on. But old Bernardone, a dour old man it appears, 
 heard the clamour, got news of the return of the fugitive, 
 and rushed forth to seize him, and knock the nonsense out 
 of him if he could. Abusing him and thrashing him soundly, 
 he dragged him home, bound him with a chain, and left 
 him to chew the cud of his meditations, and come to his 
 right mind once more.' 
 
 Eight or wrong, however, Francis had but one mind. It 
 never wavered till death. His mother, touched by his suf- 
 ferings, and with a woman's sympathy for high and unworldly 
 ideas, after loving remonstrance and entreaty, loosed him 
 and let him go. He went straight back to his hiding 
 place at St. Damian. His father, furious, swiftly followed 
 him. Francis calmly protested that neither words nor blows 
 could alter his resolution, and his father, resolved to save 
 what he could from the wreck, had him before the magis- 
 ' S. Bonaventura, u. 2. 
 
216 ST. FRANCIS OF ASSIST. 
 
 trate that he might compel a legal renunciation of his goods. 
 Francis would hear nothing of the civil magistrate in such 
 a transaction, so he was had before the Bishop. The 
 good priest of St. Damian gave up the money, Francis 
 signed a renunciation of his patrimony, and to make the 
 matter complete stripped himself of every rag of clothing 
 which he owed to his father's bounty, and stood there before 
 the amazed and delighted Bishop a free man in a plain hair 
 shirt. Francis never did anything by halves. There are 
 grave doubts whether the shirt did not follow the rest of 
 the attire. The people burst into tears. The Bishop took 
 him to his embrace, and in pity on his nakedness, procured 
 for him the dress of a poor peasant, a serf of the Episcopal 
 house, and Francis donned the beggar's gown, which he 
 wore on through life till he stripped himseK of it to die. 
 
 Filled with a transporting joy as he realised his freedom, 
 he wandered forth, making the air vocal with songs of praise. 
 Some robbers caught him in a wood, and asked him of his 
 business. ' I am the herald of a great king,' be answered, 
 and sang on. They thought him mad, beat him soundly, 
 and tossed liim into a dyke which was deep in snow. When 
 they had turned their backs, Francis jumped up and sang 
 the louder, glorying in the shame and pain. Sleeting some 
 lepers, he tended, washed, and even kissed their ulcers, and 
 devoted himself very solemnly to what was held then, and 
 was in truth, a very terrible min istry to these wretched 
 pariahs of the human race. But the tenderness of Francis 
 knew no fears and no bounds. ]\Iiracles of course attended 
 on his mioistry — aud results which it would be hard to 
 distinguish from miracles no doubt appeared. "We have no 
 need to brand as fictions or delusions all the tales of ap- 
 parently miraculoiis cures which we meet with, supported 
 by overwhelming testimony, throughout the whole I\Iiddle 
 Acre. 
 
HE ACCEPTS HIS VOCATION, 217 
 
 The next thing to be done seemed to him the rebuilding 
 of this ruined church. Poverty was the only helpmeet he 
 invoked. Begging wood and stones, and paying for them 
 faithfully with prayers, he bore them in his wasted arms 
 to the builders, and in the end the work was nobly done.- 
 Near Assisi was another poor dilapidated church, La Por- 
 tiuncula, sacred to Santa Maria de Angelis. He gave him- 
 self no rest until he had restored it after the same fashion. 
 It became the holy place of his Order, and a magnificent 
 church stands there to this day, plainly visible from the 
 hill on which Assisi stands, defying every precept of his 
 life by its splendour while it professes to honour his 
 name. 
 
 The wonderful success which crowned the efforts of Francis 
 began to open, the eyes of men to his remarkable power. 
 Those who had laughed at and pelted him, began to reverence 
 and love. Money and offerings of all sorts poured in upon 
 him ; he was fairly embarked on a great career. The decisive 
 step was at hand. Worshipping in the Church of Sta. Maria 
 he heard the Gospel read, ' Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor 
 brass in your purses, neither scrip for your journey, neither two 
 coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves.' After mass he asked the 
 good priest to explain it. The words struck home. ' This,' 
 he cried, ' is what I have been seeking for. Now I see my 
 path.' Straightway he loosed his sandals, laid down his staff, 
 cast aside his girdle, and flung his purse on the ground ; he 
 dressed hunself in one coarse cloak of serge, girded himself 
 with a rope, and went forth to preach the gospel as poor, 
 as homeless, as penniless as his Lord. 
 
 The man who could do such things in the Middle Age could 
 sweep a vast throng of followers in his train. The common 
 life of the world was so unlike all that is pictured in the life 
 of Christ as good, beautiful, and blessed, that there was a 
 
218 ST. FRAKCIS OF ASSISI. 
 
 deep chronic sadness and unrest in the heart of all the nobler 
 and . purer souls ; so that any plan of living which promised 
 to make life more Christlike had an intense attraction ; and 
 there was something very deeply in tune with the best 
 thought and aspiration of the age, in the poverty and self- 
 renunciation which the rule of St. Francis enjoined, and the 
 life of St. Francis expressed. But as yet it was simply a life. 
 It had not yet become a rule. The history of his first converts 
 of importance may here be given from the Life by the Three 
 Companions. The first was one Bernardus (of Quintavalle). 
 He Iiad watched the way of life of the saint and coming to 
 him asked him to spend the night with him. In the course 
 of their conversation Bernard asked Francis what a man 
 shoiild do who had received possessions from his Lord whicli 
 he wished no longer to keep ? He should give them back, 
 answered the saint, to the Lord from whom he received them. 
 The narrative then continues. ' And Bernardus said, " I wish, 
 my brother, to give up all my goods for the love of my Lord 
 who gave them to me, and will perform it as seems best to 
 thee." To whom the saint, " At morning-tide we will go to 
 the church and will learn through the Holy Gospel-book, 
 as Christ taught His disciples." Eising therefore m the 
 morning with one other, Peter by name, who also desired 
 to become a brother, they came to the Church of St. Nicholas 
 by an open place in Assisi. Entering this to pray, because 
 they were ignorant and knew not how to find the word of 
 the Gospel touching the renmiciation of the world, they 
 humbly asked the Lord that He would vouchsafe to show 
 them His will, by the first opening of the book. After they 
 had prayed, the holy Francis took the closed book, and 
 kneeling before the altar unclasped it, and where he first 
 opened the leaves there met his eye this counsel of the Lord, 
 " If thou ivilt he perfect, go, sell all thoti hast and give 
 to the poor, and thou shall have treasure in heaven." ' The 
 
BIRTH OF THE MENDICANT ORDER. 219 
 
 sortes were tried a second and third time with the hke result, 
 and Francis, turning to his companions, exclaimed, 'Brethren, 
 this is our life and our rule, and that of all who shall wish 
 to join our society. Go ye, therefore, and as ye have heard, 
 so do ! ' Thereupon Bernard (who was very rich) and Peter 
 sold all they had and gave the money to the poor, and 
 adopting the same dress as Francis ' from that hour lived 
 together with him according to the fashion of the Holy Gospel 
 revealed to us by the Lord.'^ 
 
 This was truly the birth of the Order, and the most notable 
 thing which in that generation happened in this world. The 
 next step was to obtain the confirmation of the Pope. Seven 
 poor men were gathered round Francis, and one morning, after 
 long prayer, he called these brethren around him and gave 
 them this solemn charge : — 
 
 ' Take courage, beloved ones, and rejoice in the Lord. Be 
 not depressed to think how few we are. Be not alarmed 
 either at your own weakness or at mine. God has revealed 
 to me that He will diffuse through the earth this our little 
 family of which He is Himself the Father. I would have 
 concealed what I have seen, but love constrains me to impart 
 it to you. I have seen a great multitude coming to us, to 
 wear our dress, to live as we do. I have seen all the roads 
 crowded with men travelling in eager haste towards us. The 
 French are coming. The Spaniards are hastening. The 
 Germans and English are running. All nations and tongues 
 are assembling together in haste.'' 
 
 ' We may seem contemptible and insane. But fear not ; 
 go rather and preach repentance for the remission of sins. 
 Faithful men, gentle and full of charity, will receive you 
 and your words with joy. Proud aud impious men will 
 condemn and oppose you. Settle it in your hearts to endure 
 all things with meekness and patience. The wise and noble 
 ' Vita, auct. Trib. Soc, c. .3. 
 
220 ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 
 
 will soon join themselves to you, and with you will preach 
 to kings, to princes, and to nations.'^ 
 
 Soon after the humble tattered squalid company bent their 
 steps towards Eome. Few things in history are more striking 
 than the meeting of Francis of Assisi and Innocent III. 
 "SVe must pause here to look at the character and position 
 of the man to whom the poor beggars of Christ draw near. 
 
 Innocent III. was, probably, on the whole the ablest man, 
 the greatest ruler, who has ever occupied the papal throne. 
 If Hildebrand, Gregory VII., was the Julius, Innocent was 
 the Augustus of the Church. Hildebrand had spent his life 
 in fierce and constant struggle. He had fought a tremendous 
 battle for the siTpremacy of the Church. He won the battle 
 but at the cost of life. ' I have loved righteousness and 
 hated iniquity, and therefore I die in exile ' were the bitter 
 words which faltered from his dying Hps. After one hundred 
 years Innocent entered into the full enjoyment of the legacy 
 which Gregory bequeathed. He was the author of that 
 memoiable simile which carries to the highest pitch the papal 
 claims, ' As God has placed two great luminaries in the 
 firmament, the one to rule the day, and the other to give 
 light by night, so He has established two great powers, the 
 pontifical and the royal, and as the moon receives the light 
 from the sun, so does Eoyalty borrow its splendour from 
 the Papal authority.' Innocent made this a reality and was 
 the supreme man in Christendom. Bernard and Becket, as 
 well as Hildebrand, had prepared his way. The xsroudest 
 monarchs submitted themselves to his authority. No power 
 in Europe was strong enough to stand up against his will. 
 Philip Augustus of France, John of England, Otho of Germany, 
 Pedro of Arragon, had all been humbled to the very dust 
 before his footstool. Frederic, the young, the brilliant em- 
 peror, the last of the great Hohenstauffen hne, was his ward ; 
 
 'Thomas of Celano, c. 4, and the Three Companions, u. 3. 
 
THE POPE AND THE MENDICANT. 221 
 
 while the conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders brought 
 the whole East under the control of his hand. Never did 
 man in this world stand on such a pinnacle of power ; and 
 never did Innocent realise more fully the meaning of those 
 tremendous words with which he entered on his papal reign, 
 ' The Pope stands in the midst ; between God and man, below 
 God, above man ; less than God, more than man,' than in 
 the hour when the company of beggars drew near. 
 
 It was evening. The rays of the setting sun were slanting 
 on the Campagna, and flooding the lofty terrace of the Lateran 
 Palace, where a group of splendidly attired churchmen were 
 walking, drinking in the balmy breath of the evening air. 
 One walked apart, simply clad, but with the mien of a 
 monarch, and the lordly brow on which sat gravely the care 
 of the great world's affairs. He was plunged in the deepest 
 thought, meditating doubtless the tremendous problems of- a 
 dominion wider and grander than any of which Nebuchadnezzar 
 or the Cffisars dreamed, when the squalid travel-stained 
 mendicant approached. Innocent, immersed in care, had 
 few words to waste on such an object, and repulsed him 
 with some scorn. Francis, humbly accepting the rebuke, 
 withdrew, and left the matter in the hand of Heaven. Nor 
 in vain. That night the Pontiff, like another great ruler of 
 old, was haunted by visions, and they shaped themselves into 
 a form which tradition has handed down to us. He seemed, 
 we are told, to see a palm tree slowly growing between his 
 feet, and rising into a beautiful tree. Greatly wondering and 
 questioning what this vision might reveal, the divine light 
 fixed in the mind of the vicar of Christ the thought, that 
 the palm represented that poor man whom the day before 
 he had repulsed. 
 
 Innocent in his turn accepted humbly the higher rebuke, 
 and caused proclamation to be made in Eome for the mendicant 
 whom he had so scornfully dismissed. Francis was speedily 
 
222 >T. FRANCIS OF A^SISI. 
 
 discovered, and brought once more into the presence of the 
 Pope. We can lift the curtain, and hear the debate, and we 
 shall find it interesting from the highest point of %-iew. The 
 scene is sketched in Bonaventura's life. Innocent heard the 
 simple tale of the mendicant, who asked only to be allowed 
 to found an Order, which would compel its members to be 
 paupers and to preach the Gospel. The only thing he asked 
 in fact, in addition to the Benedictine rule, was the allowance 
 of this absolute, utter poverty. The Pope, though greatly 
 struck by the earnestness and simplicity of the man, hesitated. 
 Some of the cardinals thought it ' a new and questionable 
 matter, and arduous beyond human strength.' It had slipped 
 from their thoughts on their spiritual thrones, that on their 
 theory Christianity could never have planted itself in the world. 
 Then arose a venerable cardinal, -John of St. Paul, Cardinal 
 Bishop of .Sta. Sabina, 'a man of all holiness, and a helper of 
 the poor of Christ,' who, fixed by the Divine Spirit, spoke to 
 the supreme Pontiff and to his brethren thus : — ' K we reject 
 the petition of this poor man as a thing new and too arduous, 
 when he seeks confirmation of the form of the evangelical 
 life, let us beware lest we be foimd to offend the Gospel of 
 Christ, For if any man says that within the obsers'ance of 
 evangelic perfection is contained anything new, irrational, 
 or impossible to keep, he is convicted of blasphemy against 
 Christ, the author of the Gospel.' 
 
 These words of the second and nobler Gamaliel prevailed. 
 The Pope turned to Francis, and besought him to pray that 
 God would make known to them His will. A second vision 
 ended Innocent's hesitation. He dreamed again. He saw the 
 Lateran Basilica faUing into riins, and a certain poor man, 
 of humble and despised aspect, stooping beneath the crushin2 
 burden, and sustaining it. ' Truly,' he cried, ' this is he 
 who by labour and doctrine shall sustain the Church of 
 Christ.' Iiinocent gTanted the request. A verbal, not a 
 
THE RULE OP INNOCENT III. 223 
 
 written, confirmation of the rule was given ; Francis was 
 sent forth with the Papal benediction to beg and to preach 
 the Gospel ; and Innocent by that day's work added two 
 centuries to the dominion of the Roman Church. 
 
 Poverty, humility, labour, again saved the Church. And 
 it was time. Eome in all ages has done her best by her 
 morals and her iniiuence to destroy the power, which the 
 holiness and self-devotion of her saintly men liave enabled 
 her to wield. The dominion of Innocent to the eye was 
 absolute and splendid. To those who looked at it closely 
 it was rotten to the heart's core. He triumphed in form 
 in every conflict which he undertook, but he met everywhere 
 a spirit which no authority and no victory of force could 
 put down — the new born spirit of free thought and national 
 life. He had made King John his vassal. But he had 
 cursed the Magna Charta and all who supported it, and the 
 barons and people of England only laughed at him. He 
 had compelled Philip Augustus to put away his Agnes de 
 Meran, but Philip had won the battle of Bouvines, and utterly 
 broken up the Pope's German combinations. He had hounded 
 on the terrible Simon de Montfort through Languedoc on 
 his mission of extermination ; the most brutal cruelty, the 
 most savage bloodthirstiness which find any record in history 
 had raged through the fairest land in Europe. Cities and 
 provinces had been given up to pillage and slaughter; 400 
 men and women had been burnt in one great funeral pile, 
 which we are told ' made a wonderful blaze, and caused great 
 rejoicing in the camp.' The literature, the national life, of 
 the Proveuijal population had literally been quenched in 
 blood ; but one thing escaped Innocent — the spirit at which 
 he aimed the tremendous blow, the anti-sacerdotal, anti- 
 sacramental, anti-Pioman spirit, the spirit of free, pure, 
 scriptural Christianity, that lived on, nursed by the awful 
 persecution through which God had sustained it — and a far- 
 
224 ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 
 
 sighted man like Innocent might well be musing there moodily 
 on the Lateran terrace, as he saw this free spirit breaking 
 out in every land. The truth is that the century of Imperial 
 power and splendour had simply pampered the Church. It 
 was an unwholesome and unlovely greatness — gTOSsness, rather 
 — which she had reached, and which the world wondered at 
 and began to criticise with bitterness. Rome, grand as was 
 her form in the eye of the nations, was becoming every- 
 where a scandal and an offence ; and the cry of the heretical 
 sects, Waldenses, Albigenses, Poor Men of Lyons — no matter 
 what their names — was for more simplicity, more purity, more 
 power, more of Christ, more of the Holy Ghost, in the system 
 and the life of the Church. 
 
 The extent to which this demand was spreading in 
 Innocent's days, would be little apprehended by those who 
 looked only on the gorgeous form of the dominion over 
 which he swayed the sceptre, and the peace which it enjoyed. 
 Here is the picture of the situation as sketched by Dr. 
 Milman : — 
 
 'From almost every part of Latin Christendom a cry of indignation 
 and distress is raised by the clergy against the teachers or the sects, 
 which are withdra-wing the people from their control. It is almost 
 simultaneously heard in England, in Northern France, in Belgium, in 
 Bretague, in the whole diocese of Eheims, in Orleans, in Paris, in Germany, 
 at Goslar, Cologne, Treves, Metz, Strasburg. Throughout the whole South 
 of France, and it should seem in Hungary, this sectarianism is the dominant 
 religion. Even in Italy these opinions had made alarming progress. 
 Innocent himself calls on the cities of Verona, Bologna, Florence, 
 Milan, Placentia,- Treviso, Bergamo, Mantua, Ferrara, Faenza, to cast 
 out these multiplying sectaries. Even within or on the very borders 
 of the papal territory Viterbo is the principal seat of the revolt.' ' 
 
 The most daring satires began to be written against the 
 
 Papal luxury and tyranny, they were chanted by monks, 
 
 it is said, to holy tunes, and passed on from convent to 
 
 convent, while princes and people added their hearty Amen. 
 
 1 Latin Ghristici.nity , Bk. IX. ch. 8. 
 
PREACHERS OF PURE CHRISTIANITY. 225 
 
 Here is a specimen of what is reported to have been 
 actually chanted at service time : — 
 
 ' Quidquid male, Roma, vales, 
 Per immundos cardinales, 
 Perque nugas Decretalesj 
 Quidquid cancellarii 
 Peccant vel notarii, 
 Totum camerarii 
 Superant Papales.^ 
 
 It would be easy to quote passages, not from enemies 
 but from bold champions of the Papal See, unquestionable 
 witnesses, to shew how the very name of Eome was growing 
 hateful to all that was righteous and merciful in the 
 Christian world. And there were, moreover, preachers about 
 Europe whom the omnipresent power of the head of 
 the Church was impotent to silence, who with more or 
 less purity and earnestness were urging upon the people 
 the pure Christian ideas which the Waldenses, the Poor 
 Men of Lyons, and other anti-sacerdotal sectaries had 
 sealed with their blood. The position was critical when 
 such doctrines as the following were abroad. These latter 
 preachers, writes the author of Latin Christianity, — 
 
 ' Threw aside the whole hierarchical and ritual system, at least as 
 far as the coiiTiction of its virtue and efficacy, along with the priest- 
 hood. The sanctity of the priest was not in his priesthood but in 
 his life. The virtuous layman was a priest (they had aspired to reach 
 that lofty doctrine of the Gospel,) and could therefore administer 
 with equal validity all the rites ; even women, it is said, according 
 to their view, might officiate. The prayers and offerings of a wicked 
 priest were altogether of no avail. Their doctrine was a full, mimite, 
 rigid protest against the wealth of the Church, the power of the 
 Church. The Church of Eome they denied to be the true Church ; 
 they inexorably condemned homicidal engagements of popes and pre- 
 lates in war. They rejected the seven Sacraments, except Baptism 
 and the Eucharist. In baptism they denied all effect of the ablution 
 by the sanctity of the water. A priest in mortal sin cannot consecrate 
 the Eucharist. The transub.stantiation takes place, not in the hand 
 
 ' Quoted by Milman, I.e. 
 p 
 
226 ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 
 
 of the priest, but in the soul of the believer. They rejected prayers 
 for the dead, festivals, lights, purgatory, and indulgences.'' 
 
 In the midst of all this luxury, splendour, lavish expendi- 
 ture, and shameless venality of churchmen, and amidst the 
 gathering discontent which the preachers of the heretical 
 sects throughout Europe were fanning into a blaze, the 
 Franciscans and Dominicans uprose. Pure Poverty was their 
 fundamental rule, pure preaching, pure persuasion their 
 fundamental work. They multiplied immensely. They threw 
 themselves with intense and fearless zeal into their ministry. 
 Europe, Africa, Asia, were fairly overrun by a crowd of 
 courageous, self-sacrificing, and believing preachers ; men 
 whose lives, and whose readiness to die, lent immense 
 weight to their pleadings ; they outpreached in their intense 
 and passionate fervour the preachers of a purer Gospel ; their 
 holy, self-denying lives, their impressive demeanour, and their 
 picturesque figures in gown and cord, swept the sympathies 
 and the hopes of the multitude in their train. They invaded 
 the seats of learning, they furnished the ablest scholars and 
 thinkers to the schools and universities, the ablest adminis- 
 trators to the Episcopal and even the Papal Chairs ; in a 
 word, they stormed the conscience and the heart of Europe, 
 and for the time the Papacy was saved. 
 * Francis having won the confirmation of his rule, went 
 back in a kind of triumphal procession, joyously to his 
 task. The Benedictines gave them the church of Sta. Maria 
 de Portiuncula for their own, to be the headquarters of the 
 Order. Francis refused even that as a possession, but grate- 
 fully accepted the use ; sending to his benefactors, as a kind 
 Fof acknowledgment, a pannier of fish year by year. Then 
 he devoted himself with passion to the pursuit of Poverty, 
 and strove to kindle in the hearts of his disciples the same 
 absorbing enthusiasm by which he was himself consumed. 
 ^ Latin Christianity, I.e. 
 
SINCERITY AND SIMPLICITY. 227 
 
 ' Poverty,' he cried, ' is the way of safety, the nurse of 
 humility, and the root of perfection ; its fruits are hidden i 
 but they multiply themselves by an infinity of means.' His 
 personal habits were of the severest rigour, and his ingenuity 
 in mortifying his body is celebrated by his panegyrists. 
 The bare ground was usually his bed and he slept sitting, 
 his head leaning against a billet of wood or a stone. He 
 rarely ate cooked food. But when his health compelled an 
 exception, he took care to mingle cinders with it, lest his 
 palate should relish it unduly. He kept eight great fasts 
 a year, and in his holy meditations and contemplations he 
 was constantly bathed in tears. But he was not a self- 
 deceiver as to the virtue of these austerities. ' One must 
 not praise a man,' he said, ' who is not sure of his lot, and 
 who, knows not what he may become. A man should not 
 glorify himself because he fasts, because he weeps, because 
 he chastises his body, all which things a sinner can do. 
 There is but one thing which a sinner never does, and that 
 is serving God faithfully, and rendering him the praise of 
 what he bestows.' And yet his simplicity allowed him to 
 indulge in strange excesses. Once, poor man, when he was 
 nearly famished, he had eaten a bit of fowl. Thomas of 
 Celano tells us that he had himself drawn, naked, through 
 the streets, and well scourged, while proclamation was made 
 ' See the glutton who gorged himself with fowl unknown to 
 you.' Once at Christmas he had a stable arranged to preach 
 in. There were the ox, the ass, the hay, and, that nothing 
 might be wanting, he bleated like a sheep while uttering 
 the word Bethlehem; and when naming the sweet Jesus, 
 he licked his lips with his tongue as though tasting honey. 
 
 We must not however take up the idea that the man) 
 was a witless enthusiast or an ecclesiastical buffoon. There 
 was stern work in him, daring courage, strong sense, and 
 far-reaching wisdom. He was of the stuff of which the 
 
228 ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 
 
 rulers of ages are made. His name echoes, and the influence 
 of his life thrills, through Europe to this day. He had a 
 direct and practical way of enforcing his commands. A 
 rebellious brother, who shewed some lingering remnant of 
 the old Adam of self-will, he had buried up to the neck 
 in the earth, and was proceeding to bury him entirely, when 
 the man capitulated. 'Art thou dead, my brother,' cried 
 the saint. ' Yes,' the culprit stammered. ' Then come forth, 
 and remember in future that I want dead followers, not 
 y living ones.' 
 
 The Order grew, as we may believe, mightily. There was 
 something in the idea of St. Francis which high-minded 
 women would not be the last to honour and love. Clara, 
 of the noble house of Ortolana, under the counsel of the 
 saint, forsook her home, and founded, in defiance of parental 
 authority, a convent of nuns who have made famous the 
 name and the rule of St. Clare. Sta. Clara was one of 
 the chief instruments in directing St. Francis to the life of 
 a missionary rather than the life of a recluse. 
 
 A great chapter of his Order was held at the Portiuncula, 
 in May 1219. Five thousand mendicants assembled. Huts 
 of straw and mud received them, the inhabitants of the 
 province delighted to supply their simple needs. They 
 were broken into groups of sixty or a hundred, each form- 
 ing a little congregation, joining in prayers or listening to 
 discourses, the theme of which was the conquest of the 
 world. Thither Cardinal XJgolino came, afterwards the 
 vigorous Gregory IX., and casting off his purple mantle, 
 his hat and shoes, he was conducted in the dress of a 
 minor brother to the place of the great assembly. ' Behold,' 
 he cried, as he looked upon it, ' behold the camp of God. 
 How goodly are thy tents, Jacob, and thy tabernacles, 
 Israel ! ' Francis had reason enough to wish that his dis- 
 ciples should have as little as might be to do with Popes 
 
VISIT TO THE SULTAN. 229 
 
 and dignitaries of the Church. He dreaded the temptations 
 of mitres and cardinals' hats ; and in the chaj^ter he lifted 
 up his voice against the seduction, and besought his fol- 
 lowers touchingly to be faithful to the simplicity and foolish- 
 ness of the Cross. 
 
 He then formulated a scheme for the spiritual conquest' 
 of tlie globe. Dividing the realms of the world among his 
 followers, for himself he reserved the post of danger, and 
 resolved to devote himself to a mission to the Saracens, 
 then struggling with the Crusaders under the walls of 
 iJamietta. In 1219, with eleven companions, he set sail for 
 the East. His clear strong sense penetrated the weakness 
 of the Crusaders' operations. He had not much hope of 
 the martLil success of the soldiers of the Cross. But his 
 business was with their enemies. And here is in brief the/ 
 history of his enterprise. 
 
 <^WIiile the two armies were in the field, Francis, carried 
 away by the warmth of his zeal, went into the camp of 
 the Saracens without fearing the dangers to which he ex- 
 posed himself On being stopped by the scouts of the 
 Infidels, he cried, ' I am a Christian, take me to your master.' 
 He was accordingly led before the Sultan, who asked him 
 what had induced him to come into his camp ? ' I am 
 sent,' answered Francis with intrepidity, ' not by men, but 
 by the Most High God, to shew to you and to your people 
 the way of salvation, and to announce to you the truths of 
 the Gospel,' This firmness impressed the Sultan, and he 
 invited Francis to remain with him. But the man of God 
 answered him thus : ' If you and your people will listen to 
 the word of God I consent willingly to remain with you. 
 But if you are wavering between Jesus Christ and Mahomet, 
 cause a large fire to be lighted, into which I will enter with 
 your priests in order that you may see which is the true 
 religion.' The Sultan replied that he did not think there 
 
230 ST. FRANCIS OF ASSIST. 
 
 was any priest of their law who would accept that challenge, 
 nor expose himself to torments for the sake of his religion ; 
 he feared besides that some sedition would spring up. He 
 offered the saint several presents, all of which he refused. 
 Some days after he sent him back with a good escort to 
 the Christian camp. 
 
 r His wider knowledge of men now suggested to Francis 
 the establishment of an Order, content to aim at a minor 
 perfection, which should lay men and women under some 
 spiritual constraints, but should yet allow them to remain 
 in, and to transact the business of, the world. The idea 
 wrought, as far as numbers were concerned, with singular 
 success. The members were bound by an agreement rather 
 than a vow, and their habits of life were not so unlike 
 those which George Fox laid down for the Society of Friends. 
 He called it the Order of Penitence, and the association 
 spread so rapidly that during the life of St. Francis and 
 his immediate successors 'the Franciscan cord was to be 
 seen on countless multitudes, in the market place, in the 
 universities, in the tribunals, in the camps, and even on 
 the throne.' After the death of Francis the Order con- 
 tinued to increase with even greater rapidity. In 1280 
 there were reckoned 1500 houses of Franciscans and 90,000 
 friars. But long before 1280 corruption had commenced 
 its work. The Order rapidly rose to power and wealth and 
 as rapidly grew rotten. The wandering friars begging through 
 Europe, losing their first inspiration, would be in the way 
 of all knavery, folly, and lust. There was little conservative 
 force in the system of the Order; when the spirit of St. 
 Francis died out of it we can well believe that morally it 
 very rapidly decayed. 
 
 r The expedition to the East is the main external event in 
 the latter years of the life of St. Francis. Never of a strong 
 
 O 
 
 constitution, and worn out by fastings and tears, he was a 
 
REPORTED MIRACLES. 231 
 
 broken man before he had reached his prime. He had lived 
 much in vision: and there was wrought into -his heart 
 and into the heart of his disciples an intense conviction 
 that there was a special closeness of likeness between 
 the outward fashion of his life and that of his Lord. 
 His biographers tell us that they had often seen him 
 lifted up from the earth so that they could only touch 
 his feet, and even to a greater height. In truth nothing 
 was miraculous with him, because all was miraculous. 
 His life was so purely spiritual that it seemed to his 
 disciples to have a wondrous power over the material ele- 
 ments and limits which shape the conditions of the lives 
 of more earthly men. They seemed plastic in his hand. 
 And there is a region here of wonder and mystery the 
 secret of which has not been fathomed yet. It is not 
 easy to make up one's mind amid all the difficulties of the 
 wondrous tale of the stigmata, and we may pass over the 
 subject with the words of Dr. Neander, who does not see 
 his way wholly to dispose of it, but calls it ' a story with 
 regard to which it still needs and deserves enquiry, to what 
 extent in certain eccentric states of the system, a morbidly 
 over-excited fancy might react on the bodily organism.' 
 
 The work of the saint was weU nigh done. Twelve 
 months of prostration followed the ecstasy in which the 
 marks of the stigmata are said to have made their appearance. 
 The autumn brought some intermission, and his voice was 
 heard in simple, brief, pathetic words preaching the Gospel 
 of the love of God, and when unable to preach in words, he 
 presented himself to the crowds on whom he gazed earnestly 
 as they thronged to touch his garments and receive his 
 benediction. As death drew near he wrote a strange letter, 
 which is preserved, to a Koman lady, in which he requested 
 her immediate presence, with a winding sheet and tapers 
 for his funeral, and with cakes which she had been used 
 
232 ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 
 
 to give him during his illness in Rome. She came ; some 
 say she was already on her way. The cakes were eaten, 
 but there was no abatement of his malady. His disciples 
 Elia and Bernard de Quintavalle were kneeling by his bed. 
 To each he gave a piece of the cake, and crossing his arms 
 to reach Bernard with his right hand, he laid a hand on 
 both and blessed them, bequeathing to Bernard the govern- 
 ment of the whole Franciscan Society. He then dictated 
 his last will, and solemnly commended his followers to the 
 Most High. His last work done, he was laid on the bare 
 ground. The evening — it was Oct. 4, 1226 — was soft and 
 calm. The western sun was glowing in the balmy autumnal 
 air. The requiem for the dying ceased, and the faltering 
 voice of the saint was heard. ' With my voice have I cried 
 unto the Lord, bring my soul out of prison, that I may give 
 thanks itnto thy name' A moment, and Francis was free. 
 
 Whatever judgment we may form of the life of St. Francis 
 as the founder of a powerful Order, none who have read the 
 tales which loving biographers have delighted to treasure up 
 and hand down to us, can question that Francis was one 
 of the gentlest and tenderest of men. His love for dumb 
 creatures was a beautiful and winning trait in a rude and 
 blood-stained age like that. They evidently felt some mag- 
 netic power in the earnest and holy preacher; the tales of 
 the trust and ministry of these dumb creatures to their 
 friend cannot all be false, nor need we question the truth 
 of them merely because they seem so marvellous to our own 
 prosaic minds. The bees are said to have settled harmlessly 
 on his lips. The birds flew round him in flocks, and when 
 the twittering of the swallows disturbed him as he was 
 preaching, ' Hush, my sisters,' won instant silence, that he 
 might declare his Lord's will. One of the earliest Italian 
 poems is a simple outpouring of his heart to his brother the 
 sun, his sisters the moon and the stars, his brother the wind, 
 
WELCOME DEATH. 
 
 233 
 
 his sister the water, his brother the fire, his mother the 
 earth; he calls them all in words of touching pathetic 
 simpHcity to awake and join him in praise. And it is in 
 beautiful harmony with this strange sense of kindred with 
 nature, which made the bees, the birds, the beasts his tender 
 and vigilant ministers, that when he felt the death shadow 
 falling around his spirit he could breathe out the words, 
 ' Welcome — my sister, Death.' 
 
IX. 
 
 ST. LOUIS OF FEANCE : THE SAINT IN SECULAR LIFE. 
 
IX. 
 
 ST. LOUIS OF FEANOE : THE SAINT IN SECULAR LIFE. 
 
 1215-1270. 
 
 St. Louis of France characterises more perfectly than any 
 of his great contemporaries the most important era in the 
 history of Christendom — the era when men began to have 
 some clear glimpse of the truth, after which they had been 
 blindly feeling through all the ages of Christian history, 
 that secular things and spiritual things are substantially 
 the same things, though looked at in a different way. 
 Secular things become spiritual things when spiritual insight 
 and energy are brought to bear upon them ; and this truth 
 began to shine out in Christendom in St. Louis' life. 
 
 Louis IX. of France, grandson of a great French king, 
 Philip Augustus, and grandfather of a great French king, 
 Philip le Bel, was as true and pure a saint as St. Bernard 
 in his monastery, while he was king, statesman, judge, 
 warrior, husband and father, and spent his life in the 
 management of great secular affairs. How much that meant 
 in those days we are not able fully to measure in ours. It 
 meant that an entirely new order of things was dawning ; 
 that the monastic age of Christendom was ending; that the 
 day of the priest was drawing to a close ; that the noble and 
 sacred development of secular society in national life, with 
 all its various organs and activities, was about to begin. St. 
 Louis, king and warrior, was a man whose saintly ideal 
 
238 ST. LOUIS. 
 
 was as high and pure as that of either of the two great 
 monastic saints, and of a far more elevated type than that of 
 St. Thomas of Canterbury, whose saintship was mainly an 
 organ of ecclesiastical power. With St. Louis the desire 
 to live soberly, righteously and purely in the world, and 
 to make his life, as far as a man's life might be, holy and 
 beautiful as his Lord's, reached down to the springs of his 
 thought and will and penetrated his every act and utterance. 
 But the object of his saintly thought and interest was not 
 the cell, nor the cloister ; not the exercises of devotion, nor 
 the services of the Church, but his duty in his secular 
 work of ruling, fighting, and judging righteously, as the 
 regent of Christ his King. He was one of the most pious 
 of men, and the exercises of devotion occupied a large part 
 of his time and thought ; but they never became the end, 
 as they tended to become among the Ascetics — as if life 
 were made for devotion and not devotion for life. With 
 St. Louis they were always means to the end which he 
 had ever in sight, to follow wisely and nobly his secular 
 calling. St. Louis had looked more deeply than most men 
 into the meaning of that sentence of St. Paul, which is the 
 true consecration of the secular life of men, ' Brethren, let 
 every man, wherein he is called, therein abide with God.' 
 St. Louis was born in the year 1215. He died in 1270. 
 So that his hfe falls wholly within that wonderful thirteenth 
 century, which really marks the end of the childhood of 
 Christendom ; the century in which it began to feel that 
 it had done with tutors and governors, and would manage 
 its life henceforth for itself, with the help of its King, in 
 whom it firmly believed, on high. It is the century of 
 Edward I. and of Frederic IL, who was one of the ablest men 
 that ever occupied a throne. As head of the Holy Roman 
 Empire, Frederick iilled a larger place in the eye of Chris- 
 tendom, but from this distance St. Louis stands out as quite 
 
CONSECRATION OF THE NATIONAL LIFE. 239 
 
 the noblest personality in that the dawning age of modern 
 history. Five years before the death of St. Louis was born 
 Dante, with whom the modern era fairly opens. The great 
 Italian poet belongs to the world in which we now are 
 living. There is always in each great era of transition 
 some one writer of transcendent genius, who, connecting 
 the old with the new, receives and hands on the sacred 
 fire, and thus Dante closes the feudal era and opens the 
 national era of Christian history. 
 
 Of this national era, as it expressed itself m the new- 
 born polity of France, the saintly kingship of St. Louis was the 
 consecration. A kind of sacredness attached to the kingly 
 power through that man's life, which lent to it a very 
 precious support in a world teeming with lawless men, 
 who, full of daring before all human forces, had a humble, 
 reverent fear of aught which seemed to bear the seal of a 
 higher sphere than this. 
 
 In connection with St. Bernard, reference has already 
 been made to the strong support which the sanctity of saintly 
 men lent to ecclesiastical institutions, which but for that 
 sanctity might have gone rapidly to wreck. The hierarchy, 
 by their avarice, ambition, and lust, were always destroying 
 that influence of the Church on the conscience of men, which 
 the purity and self-sacrifice of the saints restored. An age 
 that talks drearily of fate, or chance, or law, as accounting 
 for all tilings in heaven and earth, is an age we may be 
 sure in which the cant of the Church has drowned the music 
 of the Gospel. For men in the main do long to believe — 
 if the theologians would let them, and not sadden their hearts 
 by claiming monopoly of the Divine Counsels, and branding 
 as heretical every movement which promises enlargement of 
 thought, life, and hope to mankind. 
 
 The thirteenth century is the age in which the things 
 with which we are all familiar took, so to speak, their 
 
240 ST. LOUIS. 
 
 modern forms. Kings, nobles, peoples, towns, navigation, 
 trade, banks, manufactures, art, literature, constitutions, refor- 
 mations, in the modern sense began to appear. The central 
 feature of all is the growth of the national life, round this 
 as the sun all the others range themselves as satellites, and 
 from this they derive their main motive power. France 
 in that century grew into a nation, and St. Louis marks 
 the age of the transition. His grandfather Philip Augustus 
 had commenced the work, his grandson Philip le Bel 
 completed it, and the result seemed a more holy and 
 beautiful thing to the eyes and the hearts of men through 
 St. Louis' life. In this century the awful and oppressive 
 shadow of the Holy Eoman Empire really vanishes. 
 After the death of the last great Hohenstauffen Emperor, 
 it falls rapidly from a Catholic to a German State. 
 France becomes a kingdom with an individuality as strongly 
 marked, and with a right to recognition as clear, as the 
 Empire itself; and we discern the beginning of the balance 
 of power — that is the action and reaction of independent 
 and tolerably well matched European nationalities. The 
 battle of Bou vines, won by Philip Augustus in 1214 over 
 the Empire, established a new relation ; thenceforth France 
 and Germany become finally separate and opposed in their 
 ideas and interests, with Italy and Flanders for their battle- 
 fields, and England the spectator, the moderator, and not 
 seldom the arbiter of the strife. 
 
 In the break up of the Carolingian Empire at the end 
 of the ninth century the inheritance of the Imperial idea 
 fell to the German branch of the House. The symbol of 
 the Empire was the possession of Eome. The Holy Eoman 
 Empire was conceived of through the earlier Middle Age as 
 the ancient Imperial realm of Christendom — the one fair realm 
 of Christ co-extensive with the profession of His Gospel — 
 over which the Emperor ruled by His commission and in 
 
IDEA OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 241 ^ 
 
 His name. It is impossible for us to imagine how the 
 shadow of that great Eoman Colossus, after the complete 
 extinction of the Empire of the "West by the Teutonic tribes, 
 continued to awe and rule mankind. The barbarians who 
 shattered it continued to regard with something like religious 
 \-eneration the civilisation which they had destroyed. They 
 despised heartily Eoman rulers and Eoman morals ; but 
 Eoman ideas mastered them, and no sooner were they fairly 
 settled in the noblest provinces of the Empire, than they 
 set themselves to restore in government, literature, and art, 
 as much as they could imitate of Eome. Especially the 
 image of the Empire haunted them ; one Imperial head of 
 Christendom ; one rule, one law, one belief, through the 
 whole Christian world. They looked upon this grand 
 institution with its sublime idea of unity, as having in it 
 something Divine. It was the form of Christendom, and 
 holy with an inherent sanctity. There was a sacredness 
 in the person of a Eoman Emperor which only very slowly 
 passed over to the Eoman Bishop. The earlier Popes 
 regarded and addressed the Eoman Emperors with profound 
 reverence. The first man in the world was the Eoman 
 Emperor, and not the head of the Eoman Church. Char- 
 lemagne restored the image. On Christmas day, 800, he 
 was crowned Emperor of the West at Eome. He considered, 
 and men considered in his day, that in his person the Holy 
 Imperial rule was restored. Dying, he bequeathed the idea 
 as a legacy, and his German successors endeavoured to grasp 
 it, though it was constantly slipping from their hands. 
 
 Those will quite misunderstand the history of the Middle 
 Age who lose sight of this vague, mysterious, but impressive 
 image — the Holy Eoman Empire — which from the ninth 
 century to the thirteenth, haunted the imagination of the 
 West. Nay, readers of Dante's De Monarchid will know 
 
 liow powerfully the idea acted on great minds up to the close 
 
 Q 
 
242 ST. LOUIS. 
 
 of the Mediffival epoch. The German Emperors aimed at 
 rule ia Italy and Eome, on quite other grounds than those 
 on which Philip Augustus aimed at rule in Normandy, or 
 St. Louis in Provence. Masters of Eome, they ruled by 
 sacred right and were the suns of Empire ; while kings of 
 kingdoms like Prance and Spain were but attendant satellites. 
 England occupied a special position, and held that she had 
 an imperium of her own, beyond the bounds of the Pioman 
 world. But a French king would find it hard to shake oft' 
 the idea that an Emperor reigned by a right of which his 
 own was but a reflection, and would at first find it difficult 
 to comprehend, or at any rate to find a place in his political 
 system for, his own right to reign in independent sovereignty 
 at all. The idea was ever before the minds of such that 
 the normal condition of Christendom was that of one vast 
 State under one Imperial head ; and the rapid growth of 
 independent monarchies having no visible relation to the 
 Empire, would be a .perplexing thing to the minds of the 
 very men who were most busy in building them up. For 
 men obey the behests of present and near necessities ; and 
 are often startled by the shape which their work assumes, and 
 puzzled to reconcile it with pre-existing ideas. The French 
 kings were driven by sharp necessity to create a French 
 kingdom; but it was not until the age of St. Louis that 
 it disentangled itself from the meshes of the Imperial con- 
 ception of Christendom, and claimed on its own behalf a 
 sacred right to be. 
 
 During these five centuries the Imperial idea is really 
 the dominant thing in Christendom, but happily for Christen- 
 dom it had a twofold embodiment, in the Empire and in 
 tlie Church. In the Eastern Empire the secular power was 
 master, the Empire was forced into unity, and progress 
 was killed. In the West the government and the Church 
 grew separately. The headquarters of the former were 
 
HARMONY OF OPPOSING FORCES. 243 
 
 usually in Germany, while Rome was mainly under the rule 
 of the Popes. How essential this separateness was for the 
 full development of the Church, is revealed by the miserable 
 decrepitude of the Papacy when the French kings had it 
 under their own hand, during the 70 years' captivity at 
 Avignon. The same idea of the essential unity of Christen- 
 dom was in the minds of both, and while the Emperors 
 sought it in a secular form, the Papacy sought it in a 
 spiritual, or what in those days passed for spiritual. It 
 is important that we should realise clearly that this duality 
 was the condition of a high development, and of advance 
 towards a real and surely -grounded union. Because there 
 were in the West two co-ordinate powers struggling together 
 for the supremacy, and each doing its utmost to help 
 forward the progress on its own lines. Christian society 
 was developed more nobly in Western Europe than in 
 Eastern Europe, where one power had it all its own way. 
 It is by the harmony of strongly developed and opposing 
 forces that the highest progress is realised. Christendom is 
 the product of two forces, and is vigorous and progressive. 
 Islam is the product of one force only, and when its first 
 impulse was spent, it fell rapidly into decay. There were 
 two things which prevented the Imperial system of Charle- 
 magne from becoming absolutely dominant in Europe, and 
 overshadowing the development of the various nationalities 
 included under his rule. The one was the growing influence 
 of the Papacy, which had its independent centre at Iiome, 
 and was largely a rival power ; and the second was the 
 elective principle of the Empire. The electors were powerful 
 Princes and Prelates, who were able to limit the monarch's 
 ambition, and among whom the Pope could always stir 
 up formidable discords and so prevent the ablest Emperors 
 from carrying everything before them in the realm. In the 
 hands, however, of the great Saxon, Franconian, and Swabian 
 
244 ST. LOUIS. 
 
 rulers, the power was very formidable, though crippled 
 much in practice by the influences just referred to. 
 
 The French kings before the thirteenth century were very 
 petty princes as regards the extent of their dominions, com- 
 pared with the head of the Empire, or even the great lords 
 of their own realms. Five departments, out of the eighty- 
 nine into which France is now divided, were all that the king 
 could call his own, and within that little circle he had to 
 carry on a constant struggle with the Counts of Chaumont, 
 Clermont, and half-a-dozen others, who were the torment 
 of his life. 
 
 Louis le Gros was the first king of the Capetian house 
 (a house we must remember quite unconnected with the 
 Empire, and inheriting nothing but the vague title and 
 authority of king from the Carolingians), who made the name 
 King something of a substantial reality in France. That 
 is, he asserted and exercised a practical overlordship, as 
 the dispenser of justice and the protector of the poor, over the 
 feudal nobles ; an authority quite outside the feudal regime. 
 From that time in France the king begins to act with 
 vigour in a very visible and practical way. But Philip 
 Augustus in the first years of the thirteenth century really 
 created the realm. His predecessor, Louis VII., had married 
 Eleanor of Aquitaine, who brought the South of" France as 
 her dower. Divorced subsequently, she married the able 
 and resolute man who afterwards became Henry II. of 
 England, and has won a by no means enviable place in 
 our history. With her she took her whole domains, and 
 Henry became lord of the extent of France between 
 the Loire and the Pyrenees, besides ISTormandy and Anjou 
 which were already in his hands. When Philip Augustus 
 ascended the throne in 1180, perhaps three-fourths of what 
 is now France obeyed a foreign lord. Poor Philip is 
 said to have exclaimed, when he began to feel the burden 
 
KEIGN OF PHILIP AUGUSTUS. 245 
 
 and to realise the helplessness of the Crown against the 
 turbulent vassals, ' Whatever they may do now, they are 
 so strong I must bear their oiitrage and villanies, but please 
 God they shall become weak, and I shall grow strong and 
 powerful, and then, in my turn, I shall take vengeance 
 upon them.' His whole life was devoted to making that 
 promise good. While Henry II. lived he could not accomplish 
 much. John gave him the longed-for opportunity. He was 
 his vassal for the French provinces. On the murder of 
 Arthur he summoned him before his Court as his lord, 
 condemned him, and took possession of his lands ; recovering 
 in the end liy legal process, which was not strictly legal 
 but had a show of justice about it, almost the whole of 
 the lands which the divorce and the re-marriage of Eleanor 
 had transferred to the English Crown. 
 
 One other grand acc[uisition was made before St. Louis 
 began to reign. Into the moral aspect of the Crusade 
 against the heretics in the south of France we must not 
 enter. From our point of view it was simply, horrible. 
 But it is important to understand why it did not seem 
 horrible from theirs. Politically, the Crusade was a com- 
 plete success. Free thought and spiritual life were for the 
 time quenched in blood. A vigorous young literature, the 
 first-born of modern Europe, was destroyed. But a great 
 province which had been almost as independent as a separate 
 kingdom, was brought into vital relation with the French 
 monarchy, and this gave Louis IX. the mastery of the whole 
 realm from the English Channel to the Mediterranean Sea. 
 It was a fearfully blood-stained legacy. St. Louis was one 
 of the most merciful of men ; but he had no shadow of 
 scruple about the sharp punishment of heretics. He was 
 emphatically a man of his time ; and in the judgment of 
 his time heresy was not an intellectual aberration, far less, 
 as vjc see that it often is, a nascent truth ; it was a moral 
 
246 ST. LOUIS. 
 
 rebellion against a lawful authorit)-, a breach in the sacred 
 order of the home, the one household of Christendom, and 
 was to be put down as the rebellion of a presumptuous 
 child is put down, swiftly and with the strong hand of 
 power. Louis, accordingly, not only accepted the legacy of 
 the conquered, the murdered, province, but shewed great 
 skill and energy in making his conquest complete ; and thus 
 the kingdom grew under liis hand. The King of France 
 now became the great power in Europe, in the period when 
 the Empire and the Papacy had begun to decline, and 
 before the rise of England. To this monarchy, which was 
 really a new thing in Europe, the personal saintliness of 
 Louis IX. gave, as we have said, a kind of consecration, 
 which in that age was of inestimable worth. Louis VIL 
 and A^III. had kindled a strong enthusiasm ; under St. Louis 
 something touching on worship was added, something which 
 made a national King holy as Emperor or Pope. 
 
 There is generally to be observed a striking correspondence 
 between tlie great characteristic of the leading man of an 
 era, and the general tendencies of his times. St. Louis, the 
 leading man of his age, was a secular saint. The broad 
 feature of the thirteenth century is the growing dignity of 
 secular life. 
 
 In that century the life of a man in the world emerged 
 from its former feudal narrowness and monotony. It had to 
 do with wider and more important interests ; it was sanctified 
 by higher aims ; and it is quite natural, nay, in a sense 
 inevitable, that the transition should be marked by the life 
 of a great secular saint. The feudal age was, like the era 
 of the Judges in Israel, an age of the disintegration of political 
 society — its disintegration with a view to a reconstruction 
 on a higher and larger plan. Each castle for the time 
 became the centre of a petty state, and in the feebleness of 
 the royal power, everyone, as of old, ' did what was right in 
 
ELEVATION OF THE SECULAR LIFE. 247 
 
 his own eyes.' If it had not been for the existence of this 
 royal power, feeble as it often was, all national and imperial 
 interests would have vanished from the eyes of men. We 
 must remember that the feudal ages, savage and contracted 
 as was their life, had an order of their own not without its 
 nobleness ; their great and important work being to attach 
 the idea of duty to power. They established a system of 
 relations in which, within its limits, every man had a 
 definite position with regard to every other man, and definite 
 claims upon him. The bonds of men and classes were 
 accordingly tightly riveted under the feudal law, but 
 society was under the yoke and life was contracted and 
 depressed. Feudalism left to itself would have lived an 
 ignoble life in a dull soulless world ; the thirteenth century, 
 like the age of the Kingdom after the Judges, began that 
 enlargement and elevation of the secular life which has 
 continued to the present hour. Men were brought out of 
 their narrow feudal relations and realised that they belonged 
 to a wider world. ISTational interests, national enterprises, 
 national sorrows and joys, began to affect them, and the life 
 of the world was seen to offer to them as fair a field for 
 the exercise of high qualities as the cloister of the monk or 
 the episcopal throne. 
 
 Among the causes which tended to this elevation of the 
 secular life, four seem to stand out with peculiar promin- 
 ence, at which a passing glance may be thrown : — 
 I. The rise of the vernacular literatures. 
 II. The growth of the towns and commerce. 
 
 III. The influence of the Crusades. 
 
 IV. The development of the kingly power. 
 
 I. It has been noticed on a previous page that so long 
 as thoughtful men only expressed their ideas in a learned 
 language, there was a certain stigma of contempt upon 
 ordinary existence. Thought is the salt of life, but thought 
 
,^48 
 
 ST. LOUIS. 
 
 in the feudal ages was hidden from the multitude, and the 
 common life was left poor and unsavoury. In the thirteenth 
 century, however, the language of the people began to be 
 used freely by the cultivated to express their thoughts. The 
 life of St. Louis was written by a layman in the vernacular 
 speech, and in the next generation Dante gave to the world 
 one of its grandest works of literature in a language which 
 could be understood by the people at large. Imagine the 
 elevation of secular life which would arise from this source 
 alone ; the richest and the poorest having a common organ 
 of communication ; the best thoughts of the best minds en- 
 shrining themselves in, and thereby purifying and elevating, 
 the language of the poor. 
 
 II. The growth of the towns and of commerce. The 
 reign of Philip Augustus was marked by the rapid growth 
 of the towns. He re-founded Paris ; he gave it its cathedral, 
 market, pavement, hospitals, aqueducts, boundaries, arms, and 
 above all, a university, which dates from the year 1200. 
 Population increased and tended to centres. The people 
 were beginning as a class to feel their power, and they 
 naturally drew together. Towns waxed strong, obtained 
 charters, and attracted citizens by the security they afforded. 
 The intercourse of town life develops intelligence and 
 diffuses interest in political affairs. And thus in a score of 
 ways these centres of population grew, and in growing 
 enlarged and elevated the secular life of men. 
 
 III. The influence of the Crusades in the same direction 
 was immense. They extended commerce, enriched new 
 classes, created an order of men of business to attend to 
 the carrying on of distant enterprises, and spread a taste 
 for a more refined mode of living, though they did also 
 much to corrupt the simplicity of feudal society. The age 
 of St. Louis saw the close of the Crusades. Why ? Because 
 men saw their folly ? Not in the least. Columbus, one of 
 
INFLUENCE OF THE CEUSADES. 249 
 
 the greatest of modern men, was at heart a Crusader. The 
 Crusade was very largely an outlet for the imagination and 
 for the energy of men, shut up to a narrow and miserable 
 life. It was the romance as well as the devotion of it 
 which attracted them. Christianity had done thus much 
 for men at large. It had made them conscious of other 
 than local interests, and given them a community of 
 thought and life with distant people, which made the 
 stormy and often brutal existence of a feudal province seem 
 very narrow and poor. They craved some higher excite- 
 ment, some enterprise which would take them out into a 
 larger and nobler world, would associate them with fellow- 
 believers and band Christendom in a visible unity of aim, 
 interest and hope. This in a great measure the Crusade 
 supplied. Here was a holy enterprise in which the layman — 
 king, duke, baron, nay peasant — was more important than 
 the priest. The secular man with the cross upon his breast 
 had a sanctity which the priest could neither give nor take 
 away. He too could be a soldier of Christ in his own 
 rude way. And so the Crusade had an immense direct 
 influence on the elevation of the secular life of men ; while 
 the wider observation, the larger knowledge, the higher 
 culture which it secured indirectly to all who had any 
 concern with it, tended to establish and perpetuate the 
 elevation which it won. 
 
 IV. Co-ordinate with this, and in some measure rising 
 out of it, was the growth of the royal power. The king in 
 that age represented the unity and the majesty of the 
 nation, as against the provincial despot. Through the king, 
 the distant members of the body politic realised their con- 
 nexion with each other. The king really related the citizen 
 to a larger world ; and gave him some faint interest in 
 the condition of Christendom and the conduct of great 
 political affairs. And so this desire for an ampler existence, 
 
250 ST. LOUIS. 
 
 and for contact and concert with the great world of Chris- 
 tendom, which had been one main element in the fascina- 
 tion of the Crusade, found growing satisfaction, as the 
 national life developed itself through the extension of the 
 royal power, in the ever enlarging interests of the circle of 
 their daily lives. Men ceased to feel the glamour of the 
 Crusade, because they were beginning to find so much 
 noble work to do at home. They began to understand 
 that their Jerusalem was at home, or nowhere. ' Preach 
 the Gospel to every creature,' said Christ to His disciples, 
 ' beginning at Jerusalem.' Every great mission must begin 
 at Jerusalem, that is in the circle close round us, if it is 
 ever to accomplish much in a wider world. It is idle to 
 be regenerating Africa, China, India and the islands of the 
 Pacific, while we leave the poor at our own doors to herd 
 like brutes, and to wallow in worse than heathen ignorance 
 and brutality. Begin at Jerusalem, your native city, the 
 home and centre of your daily lives ; instruct its ignorance, 
 clothe its nakedness, cleanse its foulness, give it homes to 
 dwell in where a Christian household may live with some 
 decency and dignit3^ overcome its idleness, drunkenness, 
 and lust, and then you will not only have earned the 
 right bat won the power to bear your civilising Gospel all 
 round the world ! 
 
 Into the midst of this stirring growing life of secular 
 society St. Louis was born, and he was born to be its 
 consecrating priest. When he died he left a benediction 
 upon it which men felt to be the benediction of Heaven. 
 That the most spiritually-minded man of the thirteenth 
 century felt no temptation to turn monk, but found room 
 for all his saintly impulses and aspirations in ruling a king- 
 dom, judging a people, and leading his armies in righteous 
 wars, is a fact of tlie first importance in modern history. 
 
joinville's life of the king. 251 
 
 It was the emancipation of the religious life. Then it 
 burst the shell of the cloister, and took its place by the 
 great world's hearth-fire. It meant much when a saintly 
 monk or a saintly mendicant wielded an influence in virtue 
 of his goodness which cast the power of the hierarchy into 
 the shade ; it meant very much more when that supremely 
 Christlike man was seen to be a secular king. It is the 
 starting point of that modern progress, which will end at 
 last — -we have not reached it yet — in the emancipation of 
 the sphere of man's higher life from the despotism alike 
 of the creeds and the churches, while it accepts joyfully 
 all the help and guidance which they can give it, as it 
 does its work and fulfils its destiny, under the headship 
 of Christ alone. 
 
 Having now glanced at the spirit of the times in which 
 the lot of St. Louis was cast, and on the political and 
 spiritual significance of his life and reign, we will pass on 
 to study the man himself, of whom we fortunately know 
 much from reliable records of his words as well as his 
 works. Quite the most valuable of these is the life of 
 St. Louis, by one of his most trusted friends and followers, 
 the Sieur de Joinville of a noble family in Champagne. 
 It is fortunately a rambling familiar gossiping narrative, 
 full of graphic records and descriptions, and makes no 
 pretence to be a fine artistic production by a man who 
 had a classical model before his eyes, as is the PMlippich 
 of Guillaume le Breton, in which the ^ncid is followed so 
 closely that we are in doubt sometimes whether Philip 
 Augustus or iEneas is the real hero. Joinville's is a homely 
 nnmethodical account, but its value lies in the fact that 
 it was written by a man who almost lived with Saint 
 Louis, and who had an eye to discern and a heart to 
 reverence the moral beauty and grandeur of his life. He 
 was constantly at court, he accompanied the King on his 
 
252 ST. LOUIS. 
 
 Crusade, he loved him -with a passionate devotion, and 
 though no saint, was a man after his own heart. Joinville 
 set himself honestly to record what he saw and heard, with 
 all manner of minute loving touches which only his tender 
 reverence could have inspired. Moreover he wrote in the 
 vernacular French of the day, inditing no learned book for 
 an educated class, but a simple tale to be read by laymen, 
 and, it mic;ht be, to make his oreat master known in some 
 measure to the poor. Like Asser's life of Alfred, the work 
 is an invaluable portrait of one of the few greatest men 
 of the world by a friend and follower, written not to draw- 
 attention to the skill and talent of the author, but honestly 
 to make the subject of it known to mankind. Alfred the 
 Great was a man worthy to be set in the same rank as 
 St. Louis, and it would be hard to find the third who can 
 be placed by their side. Our own great Alfred was probably 
 on the whole the nobler man and the greater king. There was 
 the same moral dignity and purity in Alfred as in Louis, 
 the same justice, the same absolute devotion to the good 
 of his people, but in the former there seems to have been 
 greater moral and mental robustness, a stronger mind, a 
 firmer will, and a larger capacity for ruling men. Alfred 
 was free from that touch of fanaticism which appears in 
 St. Louis ; not even in the thirteenth century, we may 
 think, could Alfred have been induced to invoke the Inqui- 
 sition or to lead a Crusade. But there is a special delicacy 
 and beauty in the character of St. Louis which perhaps 
 even Alfred cannot rival, but these were connected with 
 certain saintly qualities in his nature which were an element 
 of weakness to him in the management of practical affairs. 
 From these Alfred was absolutely free. 
 
 St. Louis was probably the most purely just-minded man 
 whom we meet with in history. Just all round, to friends, 
 kindred, vassals, enemies, and infidels, he had the simplest 
 
CHARACTEE OF HIS MOTHEE. 253 
 
 lielief that what is just is not only the lightest but the 
 wisest thing to do. He seems never to have hesitated a 
 moment, nor to have allowed any interest however large 
 to obscure in the faintest degree his vision of the lisht. 
 He was not a constructive legislator like Alfred, nor yet 
 a political reformer. Though the feudal system was wearing 
 out in his days, he did not try to destroy it or even to 
 hasten its overthrow, nor did he make any attempt to 
 strengthen the monarchy that it might occupy its room. 
 And yet, as a fact, he greatly hastened the overthrow of 
 feudalism and the growth of the monarchical power in 
 France, and this partly by dealing justly with his vassals 
 and imposing on them the same duty in their turn, and 
 partly by the strong personal influence which his upright, 
 pure, and unselfish nature established over men. He ex- 
 tended widely the limits of his kingdom, though never by 
 aggressive wars, and under his hand it became consolidated 
 and grew rich and prosperous, so that the reign of St. 
 Louis is certainly a conspicuous proof that a righteous 
 political course, fearlessly pursued, enlarges, enriches, and 
 edifies States. 
 
 St. Louis was born at Poissy. His mother was Blanche 
 of Castile, a remarkably able woman, who ruled France as 
 regent during his minority with singular firmness, and who 
 established over her sou a very powerful influence, which 
 remained unbroken till her death. She was a woman of 
 this sort — one likes to know something of the mothers of 
 such men as St. Louis — when he was born they stopped 
 the bells of the church close by lest they should disturb 
 her, and upon her discovering the reason, she ordered that if 
 needful she should be removed, but that nothing should 
 hinder the summoning of the faithful to prayer. And her 
 son often in after life repeated, that Madame used to say, 
 ' that if I were sick unto death, and could only be cured 
 
254 ST. LOUIS. 
 
 by committing a mortal sin, she would rather let me die 
 than utterly offend my Creator.' It is notable that Queen 
 Blanche called the people to the coronation of her son, as 
 well as the barons and clergy, and once when there was a plot 
 of the barons to seize him, Blanche summoned the burgesses 
 of Paris and the people of the country round, who responded 
 in such overwhelming numbers that the great vassals were 
 foiled and withdrew. While young, his mother married 
 him to Margaret, daughter of the Count of Provence. But 
 like many another strong-minded mother-in-law, she could 
 not bear the young people to be much together, and made 
 Margaret's life very miserable. Margaret made him a 
 devoted wife, and St. Louis loved her tenderly, but it is 
 characteristic of his strong good sense and clear sight, that 
 he marked in her an ambitious temper and a want of 
 political wisdom, and would never during his absences leave 
 the realm in her charge ; whereas his mother while she 
 lived was regent as matter of course. But poor Louis and 
 Margaret had to meet almost by stealth. Joinville says that 
 when they stayed at Pontoise, Margaret's apartments were 
 on the floor below his own, and there was a winding stair 
 between them on which the pair used to sit and converse, 
 while her attendants and his watched at the doors lest this 
 terrible mother-in-law should draw near, in which case they 
 would fly to their own rooms. 
 
 Louis' sense of justice with regard to all matters but 
 heresy seems to have been perfect. A charter was brought 
 to him by the heir of the late Countess of Boulogne promising 
 him the County of Dammartin. The seal was almost effaced. 
 His whole council assured him that he could not be bound 
 by it. There was just a little portion of the seal visible. 
 He sent for a document sealed with the seal which he 
 used when he gave the charter. He compared them minutely, 
 determined that the seals were the same, and said, I cannot 
 
PASSIONATE LOVE OF JUSTICE. 255 
 
 ■with a clear conscience keep back the County. Being very 
 ill once he summoned his eldest son and said, ' Fair son, I 
 beseech thee to make thyself beloved by the people of thy 
 kingdom, for in truth I should like better that a Scotsman, 
 fresh from Scotland, should govern my subjects well and 
 loyally, than that thou shouldst rule them wickedly and 
 reproachfully.' His last instructions to his heir form one 
 of the noblest documents in history. 
 
 Louis was emphatically the peacemaker among his Christian 
 neighbours. War between Christians, except for the sake 
 of justice, was hateful to his heart, and when his council 
 reproached him with the foolishness of this policy, because 
 if his neighbours were suffered to iight it would weaken 
 them and leave his realm relatively stronger, he wisely as 
 well as piously answered, ' If the neighbouring princes see 
 that I leave them to fight they may well take counsel 
 together and say, The King has some evil design in allowing 
 us to attack each other, and then out of the hatred they 
 would bear me, they would all run-a-muck "against me, and 
 I might lose everything, without taking into account that 
 I should earn the enmity of God, who has said. Blessed 
 are the peacemakers.' 
 
 Perhaps the sorest trial of his love of justice occurred 
 in the Holy Land. The Crusade to Egypt had been a 
 miserable failure and the King had been made captive. He 
 had paid an enormous ransom, though it is worth noting 
 that such was the dignity of his demeanour, and so indomit- 
 able was his resolution to submit to no terms which would 
 bring moral shame on the Christian cause, that the Sultan 
 said to him, ' You say that you are our prisoner, and in 
 truth we thought so ; but you treat us as if we were held 
 captives by you.' There was strife at the time between 
 the Sultan of Damascus and the Emirs of Egypt, and the 
 Sultan offered to restore the kingdom of Jerusalem to St. 
 
256 ST. LOUIS. 
 
 Louis, if he would help him against his Egyptian foes. It 
 was the dream of Louis' life, his one absorbing passion, 
 to see that kingdom restored. But no. He had made a 
 ten years' truce with the Emirs and they had faithfully 
 released their Christian captives. He would not break his 
 word, even under that tremendous temptation, and he sorrow- 
 fully saw the restoration, of Jerusalem vanish out of his 
 sight. 
 
 On the other hand he was no easy, soft-hearted ruler, 
 disposed to make everyone happy by letting vassals, sub- 
 jects, and servants riot at will. He had no idea that he 
 could make anyone happy except by making him just and 
 good, and he was remarkably firm in securing that everyone 
 did his duty, while his stroke was swift and stern against 
 high-handed wrong. A certain Count de la Marche refused 
 homage where it was due. Louis called his vassals together 
 and asked them, 'What ought to be done to a vassal who 
 wishes to hold his lands independent of any liege lord, 
 and who refuses the faithful homage which has been paid 
 time out of mind by him and his forefathers?' They 
 answered that the lord of the soil ought to resume the 
 fief as his own property. ' By my royal name,' said the 
 King, ' this Count de la Marche pretends to hold lands 
 after this fashion — lands which have been the fief of France 
 ever since the time of the brave king Clovis !' The vassals 
 having been first consulted (this was Louis' wisdom), pro- 
 mised hearty support. He gathered a powerful army well 
 supplied with munitions of war and fell upon the foe, witli 
 whom Henry III. of England was in some way associated. 
 He shewed brilliant military conduct ; won two great battles 
 and drove Henry a fugitive into Bordeaux. He resruned 
 the fief, and only on his abject submission accepted the 
 Count as his vassal. Thus his kinc;dom crew. It is a 
 beautiful trait of his generosity that lie allowed Henry to 
 
A SYLVAN JUSTICIAR. 257 
 
 travel home to England through France, and that once, when 
 his courtiers were making a jest of the English king, he said, 
 ' Cease, I forbid you either to ridicule him or to cause him 
 to hate me for your folly. His charity and piety will save 
 him from all danger and all disgrace.' 
 
 One anecdote may be quoted to illustrate his admirably 
 wise and firm administration of his realm. In former times 
 the Provostship of Paris was sold to the highest bidder, 
 and robberies and other crimes abounded. The common 
 people were afraid of dwelling in the open country, which 
 became almost a desert. Hearing of all this, the King 
 settled that he would himself appoint an able man with a 
 sufficient salary ; and that he would abolish all the heavy 
 taxes which weighed the people down. He found a jiist 
 judge and put the matter into his hands. This officer 
 administered justice without fear or favour, and life and 
 property in Paris became perfectly secure. The same policy 
 was pursued throughout the realm, and it is said that in 
 a short time population increased so much from the justness 
 and uprightness that reigned, that the estates, rents, and 
 revenues of the kingdom were in one year nearly doubled, 
 and the country very much improved. 
 
 One of the most notable passages in media?val history 
 is that in which Joinville describes an ever memorable 
 scene in the following words : — 
 
 ' Many times have I seen this lioly saint after hearing Mass in the 
 summer, go and amuse himself in the wood of Vincennes ; when, 
 seating liimself at the foot of an oak, he would make us seat ourseh'es 
 round about him, and everyone who wished to speak with him came 
 thither without ceremony, and without hindrance from any usher or 
 others. He then demanded aloud if there were any who had com- 
 plaints to make; and when there were some he said, "My friends, 
 be silent and your causes shall be despatched one after another." Then 
 oftentimes he called to him Lord Peter de Fontaines, and the Lord 
 Geoffrey de Villette, and said to them, "Despatch these causes"; and 
 whenever he heard anything that could he amended in the speeches 
 
 R 
 
258 ST. LOUIS. 
 
 of those who pleaded for others, lie moat graciously corrected them 
 himself. I have oftentimes seen this good king come to the Garden 
 of Paris, dressed in a coat of camlet, and have carpets spread for us to 
 sit round him, and hear and discuss the complaints of his people with 
 the same diligence as in the wood of Vincennes.' 
 
 That picture is unique in European history — pure, clear- 
 sighted justice and goodness at the head of the affairs of 
 a great kingdom, and all men filled with trust and love. 
 It is not only notable, it is prophetic. It carries our 
 thought on to a time which is still in the far future, when 
 ' A king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule 
 in judgment ; ccncl a man shall be as an hiding-place from 
 the storm, a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a 
 dry place, and as the shadoio of a great rock in a weary land.' 
 
 It has been said that St. Louis was a saint as holy, as 
 unselfish, as St. Bernard, and yet he never seems to have 
 been even tempted to turn monk. It is most significant of the 
 change which in that thirteenth century was pas.sing over 
 European society, and with which St. Francis in the preceding 
 generation had very much to do, that this eminently holy 
 man felt that he could live the saintly life quite as well, 
 perhaps better, on the throne. And yet he had a very 
 deep reverence for the cloister. He ardently desired that 
 his three dearest children should take the vows, and earnestly 
 pressed it on them, but seeing at last that they felt no 
 vocation to it, with that admirable wisdom which distin- 
 guished him, he renounced his project ; and set himself at once 
 to establish them suitably in life. And it is remarkable too 
 that, devout as he was and wholly devoted to religious 
 duty, no king of France ever met with calmer, firmer 
 resistance the arrogant demands of the Church. Here is one 
 notable instance, related by Joinville in the following terms : — 
 
 'The prelates of France once assembled at Paris to speak with the 
 good St. Louis, and one (jf them . . . addressed the king, by the 
 
HE RESISTS UNJUST CLAIMS OF THE CHURCH. 259 
 
 unanimous assent of the other prelates, as follows : — " Sire, know that 
 all these prelates instruct me to tell you that you are ruining Chris- 
 tendom, and that it is sinking in your hands." The king upon this 
 crossed himself and said, " Bishop, inform me how this happens and 
 from what cause.'' "Sire,'' he said, "it is because no notice is taken 
 of excommunicated persons ; for at this moment a man would rather 
 die in a state of excommunication, than be absolved, and will in no 
 way make satisfaction to the Church. Therefore command your 
 bailiffs and provosts, that wherever they find a man who has been 
 excommunicated a whole year and a day, they constrain him to be 
 absolved by the seizure of his goods." The holy man replied that he 
 would cheerfully order this to be done to everyone who should be 
 found unjust to the Church. The bishop said it only belonged to 
 them to be acquainted with their own cause of complaint. To this 
 the good king said, that he would not act otherwise, for it would be 
 blameable before God and against reason, to force those who had been 
 injured by churchmen, to absolve themselves without being heard in 
 their own defence. And he reminded them of a Count of Brittany, 
 who was excommunicated by the prelates, for seven years, and at last 
 brought his cause before the Pope, who decided in his favour. " Now," 
 said the king, " should I have compelled the Count to seek absolution 
 at the end of the first year ... I should by so doing have behaved 
 wickedly towards God and towards the Count of Brittany." After the 
 prelates heard this they were satisfied with the answer the king had 
 made them.' 
 
 Here is something like the question between Becket 
 and Henry, settled quite quietly against the Church. Why ? 
 Because there was that perfect justice in the secular 
 power, that all knew that the best interests of men, 
 secular and sacred, were safer in the hands of the King 
 than in the hands of the priests. 
 
 There was, however, a certain strain of fanaticism in the 
 character of St. Louis, which we must take as the draw- 
 back to an otherwise uniquely noble and beautiful life. It 
 was utterly lamentable that he should leave all this lofty 
 and fruitful work for France, to waste his strength and 
 treasure in a Crusade. Of the Crusades at large something 
 has been already said. Xone were more heroic, none more 
 miserable in their issues, than the expeditions which Louis 
 led to Egypt and to Tunis, where the Crusade as well as 
 
260 ST. LOUIS. 
 
 its captain died. St. Louis was an able leader and a gallant 
 soldier. But he lacked the gift of a great commander : the 
 enterprise was too vast and difficult for his hand, although, 
 rightly handled, this of all the Crusades had perhaps the 
 best chance of success. It was, however, managed miserably, 
 and it as miserably failed. In everything with which the 
 Eong had personally to do, his highest qualities revealed 
 themselves. He fought with splendid courage and conduct ; 
 he suffered with noble patience and dignity. In defeat, 
 pestilence, famine and captivity his spirit never stooped 
 for a moment. Sick himself, he was foremost in cheering 
 his starving plague- stricken soldiers, and with his own 
 hands he helped to bury the dead. Xothing could induce 
 him, by sea or by land, to leave his comrades when his 
 life was in deadly peril ; he had led them forth on this 
 disastrous enterprise, he would not abandon them in life or 
 in death. But it is a sad, sad history, a dark chapter in 
 the record of what fanaticism has done for the wastingr of 
 the world. 
 
 Behind all this powerful and purifying poHtical and 
 social influence, we may be sure that there was a very 
 pure, lofty, and gentle nature and a very noble and wisely 
 ordered personal life. Joinville has this passage on his 
 care of his children. 
 
 ' Before this good king went; to bed lie was oftea accustomed to 
 have his children brought to him, and then relate to them the 
 brilliant actions and sajT-ngs of ancient princes, telling them to retain 
 them well in their memory to serve as examples. In like manner he 
 would tell them the deeds of wicked men, who by their luxury, 
 rapine, avarice, and pride had lost their honours and kingdoms, and 
 that their deaths had been unfortunate.' 
 
 Joinville, who was no saint, though a man of pure char- 
 acter and life, had once answered a question of the King, 
 that he ' would rather have committed thirty deadly sin.s, 
 than be a leper.' The King waited till the company left. 
 
HIS COURTESY. 261 
 
 and then took Joinville to task as he sat at his feet. ' Ah, 
 you bad musari, viusart I you are deceived ; for you must 
 know that there can be no leprosy so foul as deadly sin, 
 and the soul that is guilty of such is like the devil in hell.' 
 
 He was singularly temperate and always mixed his wine 
 with water, and asked Joinville why he did not do the 
 same. He answered naively that he had a large head and 
 a cold stomach, which would not bear it. Two were talking 
 at table in a low voice. ' Speak aloud,' said the King, ' or 
 your companions will think that you are speaking evil of 
 them.' 
 
 The following anecdote reveals an exquisite courtesy and 
 consideration for others. Robert of Sorbon once reproached 
 Joinville for being more richly dressed than the King. 
 Joinville turned the tables on him, saying that he wore 
 the dress handed down from his ancestors, ' It is you who 
 ought to be reprimanded, for you are descended from bond- 
 men on both sides, have quitted the dress of your ancestors, 
 and have clothed yourself in finer camlet than the King 
 now wears.' The King, to Joinville's surprise, rather took 
 the part of Robert. Afterwards St. Louis called Joinville 
 and confessed that he had been wrong in taking his part, 
 'but I did it from seeing him so much confounded, that 
 he had need of my assistance, and about dress the wise 
 man says, " We must dress ourselves so that the elders may 
 not think that we dress too grandly, nor the young ones 
 that we dress too meanly." ' This is worth quoting because 
 it shews not only his courtesy, but his practical wisdom ; 
 unless we go to Polonius it would be hard to find a wiser 
 remark about the seemly in dress. 
 
 It need hardly be said that there was peculiar tenderness 
 in his consideration for the poor. He took into his house- 
 hold an old servant, whom his grandfather had dismissed 
 because the fire crackled. Once he had an inflammation 
 
262 ST. LOUIS. 
 
 in the leg, which gave him great pain. He wished to 
 examine it, and Jean held a lighted candle close to the 
 limb. He let a drop of burning grease fall on it. Louis 
 started up in agony. ' Jean, Jean, my grandfather sent 
 you away for a much less thing ! ' was his only rebuke. 
 There were always some poor set down to dinner with 
 the officers of his household. Three invariably dined in the 
 royal apartment, quite near the King. Joinville says, ' I 
 have often seen him cut their bread and pour out their 
 drink.' Not seldom, when he had a little time on hand, he 
 would say, ' Let us go and visit the poor of such a place, 
 and give them a feast to their liking.' A poor woman 
 stood at the palace door with a loaf ' Good King,' she 
 said, ' it is this bread, thy charity, on which my poor 
 husband liveth, who is lying at home very ill.' The King 
 took the loaf saying, ' The bread is hard enough,' and went 
 with her to the house to see the sick man, and to take him 
 in more senses than one, better bread. Once a leper on the 
 other side of a muddy pool dared not approach, but tried 
 to attract his attention. The King crossed over, gave him 
 some money, and then took his hand and lifted it to his 
 lips. ' Inasmuch as ye liavc done it unto one of the least 
 of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.' Thus he 
 bore himself through the noblest and most beautiful life lived 
 during the Middle Age of Christendom. One word on the 
 death, which fitly closed it, and we have done. 
 
 In 1270 he was so ill that discerning eyes might have 
 seen that his end was near. He was 5 5 years of age, but 
 he was never strong and he was worn out with toils and 
 cares, and, let us add, the strain of such a lofty life. Then 
 once more the Crusading passion seized him. Seized him 
 is the appropriate word. St. Louis is hardly responsible for 
 that last mad and fatal Crusade. He was like a man 
 under the dominion of a fixed idea, against which reason 
 
LAST CRUSADE AND DEATH. 2 63 
 
 was vain. His people, his barons, even the Pope, entreated 
 him to abandon it. They pointed to the splendid progress 
 and prosperity of the realm which his wisdom, firmness, 
 and justice had created, and dreaded lest a hopeless enter- 
 prise, by robbing it of its head, should lay it in the dust. 
 Joinville even flatly refused to sail. But it was in vain ; 
 nothing would turn him from his purpose, and we may 
 trace in his determination something of the insane obstinacy 
 of disease. His intellectual powers were e^ddently failing. 
 The Crusade was nothing but disorder. There was no 
 ruling mind anywhere. They directed their course to 
 Tunis. There was no order in the fleet, no order in the 
 camp, no order in the tield ; there were no stores, there 
 was no food. Pestilence broke out in the army, aggra- 
 vated by famine. The soldiers died like sheep, and their 
 bodies rotted in the sun. Louis at last was stricken, 
 and he knew, and knew joyfully, that the hour of his 
 departure was come. He gathered about him those of his 
 children who were with him, and laid his charge upon 
 them as a dying Christian father, with pathetic emphasis 
 and tenderness. Then, true to the habit of his life to devote 
 himself to the service of the State and of Christendom, he 
 received some ambassadors from Constantinople by his dying 
 bed, and heard their requests. During his last night he 
 frequently started up in bed and cried, ' Jerusalem 1 
 Jerusalem ! \ve will go to Jerusalem ! ' At last he ceased 
 to speak ; but he had himself laid on a coarse sack covered 
 with ashes with the Cross before him. Then the light died 
 out of his eye, and the death shadow gathered over his 
 brow. 'Father, after the example of the Divine Master, 
 into Thy hands I commit my spirit." was murmured from 
 his stiffening; lips. A moment more, and the most passionate 
 desire of his heart was satisfied. He had passed to the 
 Jerusalem on high. 
 
X. 
 
 JOHN WYCLIF, AND THE DAWN OF THE 
 EEFOEMATION. 
 
X. 
 
 JOHN WYCLIF, AND THE DAWN OF THE 
 REFORMATION. 
 
 The Papal Empire touched the height of its power under 
 Innocent III., who was reigning in 1200 a.d., when that 
 great thirteenth century dawned, wherein all things in 
 Europe began to be new. He realised the dream of Gregory 
 VII. — a Papal Kingdom of Heaven. Gregory died in exile 
 broken-hearted, but Innocent wielded imperial power over 
 the kings of the world, in the name of Christ, their King. 
 When John of England, lord of the freest and strongest 
 realm in Christendom, accepted vassalage, the Pope felt 
 himself substantially overlord of all the lordships of this 
 earth. And this position is precisely what Innocent meant 
 to claim, when he wrote — ' The Lord committed, not the 
 Church universal only, but the whole world to Peter's rule,' 
 and formulated the thesis already referred to, that Pope to 
 King is as sun to moon, and that as the sun sways his 
 planets, so the Pontifical is set to regulate the Regal power. 
 
 There is a grand truth behind Innocent's words, to which " 
 hatred of assumption often blinds us ; but it is a truth 
 marred by a tremendous mistake. The secular needs the 
 spiritual to enlighten and to rule it; the spiritual is its 
 true light and lord. So far Innqcent was right. But the 
 sun which is to lighten the darkness and to rule the 
 motions of the secular sphere, is neither Priest nor Pope, 
 
268 JOHN WYCLIF. 
 
 \ but the Lord Christ working by His word and Spirit in 
 
 ■ human consciences and hearts. Here' is the deadly error of 
 
 j the Papacy, in that the Pope ' as God, sitteth in the temple 
 
 ^, of God, shewing himself that he is God.' And this is the 
 
 fatal root of all the shame which the institution has brought 
 
 upon the Gospel, and all the suffering which it has inflicted 
 
 V on mankind. 
 
 Innocent realised the Papal dream for the moment, and 
 then from that moment the ecclesiastical dominion began 
 to decay. It came about in this wise. John of England 
 the Papal vassal, and Otho the Papal claimant of the 
 Empire, banded under Papal auspices against the Erench 
 King, Philip Augustus. The Erench people, and notably 
 the townsfolk, rallied round Philip, and on August 27, 
 1214, he gained the great victory of Bouvines. ISTeither 
 party probably mustered more than 20,000 men, but for 
 all that Bouvines was one of the most notable battles of the 
 world, and for this reason — a Erench nation gathered around 
 a Erench monarch, and held its own against Pope and 
 Empire. It was the victory of a nation wherein the common 
 people had their place and part, and it marks decisively 
 the rise of this new force in Europe, before which the 
 Papal tyranny was destined ultimately to go down. 
 
 If the poioer of the Papacy culminated under Innocent, 
 about the year 1200, its siAcnclour shone out in 1300, at 
 the great Jubilee which was held in Eome by Boniface 
 VIII., the last of the great Imperial Popes. Splendour 
 always follows in the wake of power ; an age of splendour 
 is always vitally an age of decline, and its glow is just 
 the fungoid brilliance of colour with which nature does her 
 best to cloak decay. Boniface, imperious perhaps rather 
 than imperial, conceived the grand idea of a Jubilee of the 
 Universal Church. A great crowd of pilgrims made their 
 way in that year, 1300, to Ptome, and left their costly 
 
FALL OF BONIFACE VIIL 269 
 
 offerings at the shrine of St. Peter. The ambassadors of 
 the leading States of Christendom brought their homage, and 
 Boniface, as he looked round on that vast and glittering 
 throng, might well believe himself the one overlord and 
 master of the world. Indeed he is said to have seized a 
 sword, and to have crowned himself with the imperial 
 crown, shouting, ' It is I who am Caesar ; it is I who will 
 defend the rights of the Empire.' 
 
 Innocent had wielded the two swords, Boniface must 
 display them, and flourish them before the eyes of men. 
 The boast was a sign that the swords no longer rested 
 firmly in his grasp. There were keen observers there who 
 were noting everything — John Villani, and Dino Compagni, 
 the founders of that intellectual school of historians and 
 critics which was rising to power in Florence, and was 
 destined to play such a part in the coming age. Compagni 
 says that he conceived the first idea of his history at that 
 Jubilee ; one must read a good deal to understand how 
 fatal honest history has been and is to Home. A few 
 months later Dante was in Rome ; Dante, who in that 
 transcendent poem which rounds the Middle Age and opens 
 the Modern, pictures, with his terribly graphic pen, that 
 very Boniface writhing and shrieking amidst the torments 
 of the Inferno. 
 
 Soon after that Jubilee the Papal power bent to its 
 fall. Philip le Bel of France was the bitter enemy of 
 Boniface, as his ancestor had been of Innocent, and in 1300 
 Philip le Bel was already master. Three years after that 
 splendid triumph, the Pontiff, who had seen the civilised 
 world at his feet, was struck from his throne by the brutal 
 hand of the emissary of the French King. Philip had 
 assembled the States General to prepare himself for the 
 conflict, and Michelet calls that the baptismal register of 
 the nation. The most furious diatribes against Boniface 
 
270 JOHN WYCLIF. 
 
 were uttered, and Philip, having a nation thoroughly roused 
 and resolved behind him, sent his representatives to summon 
 the Pope before a Council They found him at Ana.gni, 
 and taking with them a member of the C'olonna family 
 and a troop of mercenaries, they broke into the town. 
 AVilliam of Xogaret addressed him with fierce vituperations; 
 Colonna struck him with his mailed hand, and would have 
 killed him, but the more politic Frenchman forbade. Old 
 and broken as he was with 86 years of toils and cares, the 
 Pope bore himself bravely. For three days he remained 
 in the hands of tiis captors, refusing all food for fear of 
 poison, and then the people rose and rescued him ; but it 
 was too late. He was borne star^dng into the market-place. 
 ' \Vhoever will give me the least morsel to relieve my 
 wants,' he sobbed, ' I will give him absolution for all his 
 sins.' Thien he set out for Ptome, which he entered only 
 to die. Stories were current at the time that as the 
 last hour approached, he became fiercely blaspihemous. It 
 is said that he drove from him the priests who came with 
 the viaticum, and thus ' unhouseled, unannealed,' denvin? his 
 Lord, execrating the Virgin, with oaths and curses which 
 made men shudder, screaming with curious confusion of 
 toni'ues, ' AUonta di I);o, et de Sancta Maria, Xolo, Nolo,' 
 the imperious spirit of the last of the .great Medieval Popes 
 passed up to its dread account.^ 
 
 ITiis striking and terrible history is the true proloane to 
 the tale of "Wyclifs life and work. Thie dishonour and 
 decay of the Papacy was a fundamental condition of that 
 new state of society in which he was to sow to such 
 noble purpose the germs of the Pieformation. The special 
 
 ' Ferretns Vincentinus, ').[,v.d Muratori, B.I.S., vol. xii., col. lOOS. It is fair 
 to add that there are other accounts whi'-h give a more farourable picture of 
 the \a£,l hoars of Boiiiface. 
 
PREPARATION FOR WYCLIf's WORK. 271 
 
 characteristics of the new epoch which opened with the 
 thirteenth century have been described in previous lectures. 
 Among the features of the age which help to explain the 
 growing resistance which men were disposed to offer and 
 able to offer to the overweening claims of Rome, notice has 
 been already taken of the rise of national feeling, of national 
 monarchies, and of vernacular literature. The latter is so 
 intimately associated with the name of the first translator 
 of the Bible into modern English that it claims here a 
 further word. One often hears hasty expressions used 
 about the sin of burying the Scriptures in a learned 
 language, which scholars only could understand. But while 
 the modern languages were in process of formation, there 
 was nothing else to be done. The Latin being a dead, 
 and therefore a fixed, language, while living languages were 
 rapidly changing and settling into shape, the use of the 
 former served a purpose of incalculable importance to 
 Europe during the era of transition ; while at the same 
 time it threw enormous power into the hands of the men who 
 alone were familiar with it, the ecclesiastics of the Eoman 
 Church. We must clearly understand that this grew out 
 of the necessities of things, not out of an ecclesiastical 
 conspiracy against the liberties of mankind. Eome had 
 no dread of the Scriptures until they were appealed to 
 by the advocates of Reform. While during the thirteenth 
 century the vulgar tongue was growing to form in all the 
 western nations, Italy of course leading the way, in the 
 fourteenth it was fairly fit for literary use. In the beginning 
 of the century, Dante found, or made, his dear Italian the 
 fit vehicle for his wonderful poem, while before the end of 
 it, the vulgar English became suited in Chaucer's hands 
 for the noblest artistic treatment, and in Wyclif's for the 
 translation of the word of God. 
 
 We have seen Boniface VIII. overthrown in the plenitude 
 
272 JOHN WYCLIF. 
 
 of his power. The work of Philip did not end with the 
 outrage. He was strong enough to compel the removal 
 of the Papal Court from Piome to Avignon in France, where 
 the Popes became mere puppets of the French kings. For 
 seventy years they remained in exile — Papal writers call 
 it the seventy years' Captivity — then on the restoration to 
 Eome in 1376, the Papist schism arose. The French and 
 Italian parties set up their Popes against each other, and 
 from 1378 to the Council of Constance, where in 1417 
 the scandal was put down with a high hand by the assembled 
 prelates of Christendom, there were Popes and Antipopes 
 fighting and cursing each other with the intensest fury, 
 amid universal sorrow and shame. This captivity and 
 schism were naturally attended by a frightful corruption 
 of ecclesiastical society. It is a dark subject, but we must 
 glance at it in order that we may fairly grasp the features 
 of the age and understand the forces which were working 
 for Reform. 
 
 No one who has not looked closely into the history of 
 the times can imagine the horrible corruption that was 
 covered by the splendid mantle of the Papal Church. The 
 policy of Hildebrand had at last triumphed, clerical celibacy 
 was the law, and society was reaping the inevitable fruit. 
 As a political measure celibacy was in a sense a grand 
 success. It gave the rulers of the Church an able, dis- 
 ciplined, and devoted militia, to fight its battles and to 
 spread its net in every country in Christendom. Never 
 in the whole course of its history has the world seen such 
 a force at the absolute disposal of one will as the celibate 
 priesthood of the Eoman Church in the service of its head. 
 The hierarchy gained its end triumphantly, and society, 
 though it reaped some high advantages- — for instance the 
 priesthood was kept from becoming a caste — paid on the 
 whole a fearful price for them. 
 
OORKUPTIONS OF THE CHURCH. 273 
 
 It is no anonymous libeller, but a dignitary of the Spanish 
 Church, who, writing in this age, declared that the bastards 
 of the ecclesiastics were little inferior in number to the 
 children of the laity. If we cast our eye over the legisla- 
 tion of provincial councils, we find damning proofs that 
 the most fearful forms of vice ran riot in ecclesiastical 
 society. An early Dominican retails the legend which re- 
 presents tlie devil as thanking the prelates of the Church 
 for conducting all Christendom to Hell. Innocent IV. left 
 Lyons in 1251 after residing there eight years with his 
 court. The farewell speech of Cardinal Hugo is significant. 
 ' My friends, since our arrival here we have done much for 
 your city. When we came here we found three or four 
 brothels ; we leave behind us but one, but it extends 
 without interruption from the eastern to the western gate.' 
 I'erhaps the sternest condemnation of the morals of the 
 Iloman Court is to be found in the language of the noble 
 and high-minded Bishop Grossetete of Lincoln in 1253. 
 He quoted against it when dying the scathing lines : — 
 ' Ejus avaritim totus non sujjicit orbis ; 
 Ejus luxuries meretrix non sufficit omnis.' 
 When the Papal Court was at Avignon, Petrarch was there 
 to observe and to record. It would not be possible to 
 quote here one-tenth of the terrible account which he gives 
 of the sensual enormities which were mere pastime to Prelates 
 and Popes, but here is the famous sonnet which embodies 
 his tremendous denunciation of the corruptions and crimes 
 of Eome, to which every country in Latin Christendom 
 said. Amen : — 
 
 ' Fountain of woe ! Harbour of endless ire ! 
 The school of errors, haunt of heresies ! 
 Once Rome, now Babylon ; the world's disease 
 Wlio makest man to groan with mad desire ! 
 O Forge of Fraud ! Prison dark and dire ! 
 Wlieri' dies the good, where evil deeds increase, 
 S 
 
274 JOHN WYCLIF. 
 
 Thou living Hell 1 Portents will never cease, 
 
 If Christ move not to purge thy sin with fire. 
 
 Founded in chaste and humble poverty, 
 
 Against thy Founder thou dost raise thine horn, 
 
 Thou shameless harlot ! And whence comes this pride, 
 
 Even from foul and loathed adultery, 
 
 The price of lewdness. Constantine return ! 
 
 Not so : the craven world its doom must bide.' 
 
 Eeference need hardly be made to the well-known catalogue 
 of crimes which the Council of Constance laid to the charge 
 of Pope John XXIII., when it deposed him. They include 
 incest, violation, adultery, homicide, poisoning, simony, heresy, 
 and materialism. John suffered judgment to go by default. 
 
 These terrible tales were freely repeated and firmly 
 believed throughout Christendom ; every point could be 
 illustrated out of popular ballads, as well as from grave 
 historians and doctors of the Church. ' How then,' it may 
 be asked, ' did the system hold together ? Why did not 
 secular Christendom rise on it and sweep it from the earth?' 
 Well, the system lived on partly through the tremendous 
 strength of its organisation and the depth of its root fibres, 
 partly through the vague and awful forces which were 
 believed to be behind it, but mainly, let it be said in 
 justice, through the good work which it did for the world. 
 Now, as then, the strength of the Roman Church lies neither 
 in the wisdom of its head, nor in the heavenly- mindedness 
 of its hierarchy ; if that had been all it would long since 
 have gone down into the abyss. Eemember Chaucer's noble 
 description of the poor Parson : — 
 
 ' That Cristas gospel trewely wolde preche. 
 His parishens devoutly wolde he teche. 
 Benigne he was, and wonder diligent, 
 And in adversite ful patient : 
 
 To drawen folk to heven, with fairenesse 
 By good ensample, was his besinesse : 
 
PAPAL RAPACITY. 275 
 
 But it were any persons obstinat, 
 What so he were of highe, or low estat, 
 Him wolde he suibben sharply for the nones. 
 A better preest I trowe that nowher non is. 
 He waited after no pompe ne reverence, 
 Ne maked him no spiced conscience, 
 But Cristes lore, and his apostles twelve, 
 He taught, but first he folwed it himselve.' ^ 
 
 Think of the multitudes of such men, quiet, holy, benignant 
 village pastors, whom in all ages the Eoman Church has 
 scattered about Christendom. They have in all ages helped 
 mightily to save the Church which Popes and Prelates have 
 done their best to destroy. 
 
 One other feature of the Church of the period must be 
 noted — its rapacity, which had much to do with Wyclifs 
 life and work, . and in this connection England appears on 
 the scene. Papal dominion seemed to the Eoman states- 
 men to carry with it the right of taxation. The expenses 
 of the Eoman Court were enormous, the waste prodigal. 
 It was the rapacity of the spiritual rulers which at length 
 brought them to the dust. The Pope had been allowed 
 to shear his own sheep, the clergy, pretty closely, though 
 with some limitation on the part of the secular power. 
 But when he began to put forth the claim to tax the 
 people as well as the priests, the hour of his overthrow 
 drew near. There is a curious calculation of Bishop Grosse- 
 tete of Lincoln in the thirteenth century, which Matthew 
 Paris records : — 
 
 ' Innocent, the present Pope, hath impoverished the Church more 
 than all his predecessors since the first establishment of the Papacy. 
 The revenues of foreign clerks appointed in England, and enriched by 
 the Church of Eome, amounts to 70,000 marks. The clear revenue of 
 the king was reckoned not to amount to more than a third of that 
 sum.'^ 
 
 In the Good Parliament of 1376 — and men and bodies 
 1 Prologue, 1. 483 fF. "" Matthew Paris, ad arm. 125.3. 
 
276 JOHN WYCLIF. 
 
 got baptised ' good ' in those times, very much on the ground 
 of antagonism to Rome — the Commons say : — 
 
 ' The taxes levied by the Pope amount to five times those levied by 
 the King. . . . The brokers of the sinful city Eome promote for 
 money unlearned and unworthy caitiffs, to benefices of the value of 
 1000 marks, while the poor and learned hardly obtain one of 20. So 
 decays sound learning. They present aliens who neither see nor care 
 to see their parishioners, despise God's services, convey away the trea- 
 sure of the realm, and are worse than Jews or Saracens. God gave 
 his sheep to be pastured and not to be shorn.' ^ 
 
 In England the extortion had filled the cup to the brim, 
 and when Wyclif was young it was already beginning to 
 overflow. England was then on the whole the mo st advanced 
 of the European kin gdoms,__and_m ost ripe for j ^rojects of 
 Eeform. Our commonalty, the yeomen and citizens of 
 England, became a factor of recognised importance in the 
 national polity long before the fourth estate grew to man- 
 hood in any other country of the West. The French wars 
 made them a power in Europe, and filled those, at any rate, 
 who met them in fight with a great dread of their powers. 
 Moreover, the reign of Edward III. was a martial reign, in 
 which constant wars necessitated constant appeals to Parlia- 
 ment. Seventy writs were issued during his rule of fifty 
 years ; and the representatives had already established the 
 principle that redress of grievances must precede supplies. 
 In England, therefore, there was a stirring active people, 
 trained to judgment on weighty matters, ready to Wyclif s 
 hand. It was a time, too, of intense fermentation. An 
 old age was ending ; men felt it tremblingly, and they 
 were eager to hear what could be told them about a new. 
 The fearful pestilence which wasted Europe about the middle 
 of the century, and which is said to have destroyed one- 
 half of the population, left behind it when its shadow 
 passed away very important moral and economical results. 
 
 'See Milman, Latin Christianity, Bk. XIII., ch. 6. 
 
ADVENT OF WYCLIP. 277 
 
 In curious ways it opened that great conflict between 
 capital and labour wliich has been a mainspring of human 
 activity from that day until now. It left, also, a profound 
 moral impression on the heart of the people, and had much 
 to do with that deep sadness which overshadowed English 
 society, when the old King was closing his long and brilliant 
 reign in confusion and disaster. 
 
 It was in such a society, sick to the heart of the coiTup- 
 tions and extortions of Rome ; emerging from the feudal 
 order, but in sore perplexity as to what should succeed 
 it ; seething with social discontents, groaning in social 
 travail, and still quivering under the wave of moral emo- 
 tion which had swept over it, that John Wyclif made the 
 pure word of Christ's Gospel once more a power among 
 men. 
 
 Before the death of Edward III. in 1377, Wyclif was 
 already a noted and powerful man in England, and indeed 
 in Europe, and had kindled that light which has burned, 
 and must burn, brighter and brighter unto the perfect day. 
 He was born somewhere about 1324, and was one of those 
 ' Yorkshiremen stern of mood ' whom Scott celebrates — 
 thorough to the backbone. We hear singularly little of 
 his early history, but it appears that about 1340 he made 
 his way to Oxford, where we find him connected with Balliol 
 and with Merton, a college which could boast already many 
 illustrious names. 
 
 In the twelfth century the Universities began their rise, 
 and in the thirteenth they had become a leading power 
 in Europe, planting throughout the West the foci of forces 
 which would in time prove quite as deadly to the supremacy 
 of the Church from the intellectual side, as, in the poli- 
 tical sphere, the development of national institutions and 
 national life. It was out of the University of Oxford, 
 through Occam and subsequently through Wyclif, that the 
 
278 JOHN WYCLIF. 
 
 first clear and Scriptural protest went forth, from teachers 
 of European reputation, against the Mystery of Iniquity 
 which was seated on the seven hills of Eome. Occam, 
 who died in 1347, had spoken out with exceeding plain- 
 ness, and in one polemical treatise had proved the Pope to be 
 a complete heretic. The ideas, therefore, which Wyclif was 
 about to promulgate to the world were not wholly strange 
 to Oxford ears. 
 
 We can form little idea in these days of the intense 
 interest which in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries 
 gathered around the seats of learning. Two hundred years 
 before, thousands of students, very poor most of them and 
 many of them very ragged, had streamed after Peter 
 Abelard, as he moved from town to town lecturing about 
 all things on earth and in heaven, and opening the living 
 intellectual springs. Before the great plague 30,000 
 students are said to have resorted to Oxford, all passionately 
 eager to drink of the new fountain, and to arm themselves 
 with the new weapons of thought, the value of which in 
 the decline of feudal ideas they had begun to realise. 
 The University was from the beginning a commonwealth, a 
 republic of letters. Prince, clerk, peasant, were absolutely 
 level on its floor ; thought alone was king ; all nations had 
 there one language a.nd one interest. Oxford has as grand 
 a record as any city in Europe, and a full history of 
 Oxford would be very largely a history of the higher 
 progress of Christian society. 
 
 In the University Wyclif achieved a very high reputation 
 as a scholar and teacher before he stood forth as a Eeformer. 
 Probably about 1366 he became Doctor of Divinity and an 
 authorised public teacher, and he was soon distinguished as 
 the most popular and powerful disputant of his time. Henry 
 of Knighton says of him, 'As a the ologian he was t he most 
 eminent ofj^ie day, as_a^ philosopher second to none, and as 
 
DENUNCIATION OF THE FRIARS. 279 
 
 a schoolman incomparable.'^ In 1375 the King presented 
 him to a prebend in the diocese of Worcester, and about 
 the same time to the rectory of Lutterworth, which he held 
 till his death in 1384. 
 
 It was from his Doctor's chair at Oxford that Wyclif 
 commenced his searching examination and rebuke of the 
 tyranny, the superstition, and the profligacy of the Papal 
 Church. One of_themost_cflnspicuous features in his polemic 
 ag'ainst Rome wa^ his scathing denunciation of the Mendicant 
 Orders, who, Jiaying_been a century and a half before well- 
 nigh the saviours of Chrisj}enjioin, had jiqw become something 
 miich more like its_pfist__„In a previous Lecture the rise of 
 the Mendicant Orders was traced to the time of their first 
 glory, and it was noticed how soon the inevitable corruption 
 began to set in. Notwithstanding their vow of poverty, they 
 grew enormously rich even in spite of themselves, and as they 
 grew rich they degenerated. When once the spiritual fervour 
 died down their wandering life demoralised them rapidly, and 
 within thirty years of the death of St. Francis, Bonaventura 
 thus writes of his Order : — ' They are immersed in carnal 
 repose. . . such is their rapacity that it is no less 
 
 terrible to fall in with them than with so many robbers,' 
 while in Boccaccio and Chaucer ' friar ' is the synonym for 
 gluttony, rapacity, and lust. 
 
 These friars literally swarmed about Europe. They had 
 landed in England in 1224, when the Order was in the first 
 glow of its pure and lofty self-devotion. Their quaint attire 
 led the dignified monks of the elder Orders to mistake them 
 for buffoons, and they were even turned out of monasteries 
 because they would not amuse the inmates by tricks. But 
 monk and layman soon found that the new comers were ter- 
 ribly in earnest. They settled in the most wretched rookeries 
 of the towns, and gloried in ministries from which all other 
 ' De Eventihus Anglim, col. 2604. 
 
280 JOHN WYCLIP. 
 
 Christian charity recoiled. Wealth and converts flowed in 
 upon them. They invaded the Universities and occupied the 
 most distinguished chairs. They took the bread out of the 
 mouths of the parochial clergy by their zeal, their preaching 
 power, their cleverness, and the easy terms of their absolutions. 
 In the Universities their proselytising influence was so dis- 
 astrous that parents grew alarmed, and the Archbishop Fitzralph 
 of Armagh declares that from this cause mainly the students 
 at Oxford were, v?ithin his memory, reduced from 30,000 
 to 6,000. Against the friars Wyclif directed his fiercest 
 assaults, and the points just touched on will explain why 
 neither University, Church, nor Commonalty, was sorry to see 
 them vigorously attacked. And yet, corrupt as they had 
 become in the time we are speaking of, as they roamed about 
 Europe with their sermons, their tales, their relics, their 
 absolutions, their jests, and their tricks, they had done in 
 their time a work of incalculable importance, and had at any 
 rate mingled some Christian ideas once more with the daily 
 life and the busy occupations of mankind. The monk, we 
 have already seen, went out of the world, the friars went 
 into the world, and as clever talkers, striking preachers, 
 stirring newsmongers, they brought such truth as they had 
 to offer into vital contact with the hearts and consciences 
 of men. They stirred thus an interest and created a yearninu 
 which a purer truth alone could satisfy, and they made ready 
 the path, though in ways which they knew not, ibr the 
 preachers of the everlasting Gospel. 
 
 For a brief space, less than a generation, the first inspiration 
 lasted, but when Wyclif opened his attack, the Christian work 
 of the Order had long been done. It was corrupt to the root 
 and was corrupting everything around. As a specimen of 
 the way in which Wyclif handled the friars, the following 
 may be quoted, and it will be observed that behind all his 
 argument against them is the idea that the Order is condemned 
 
EXACTIONS OF ROME. 281 
 
 because its authority is not in the Word of God. The passage 
 runs as follows : — 
 
 'See now where these friai-s break falsely all the commandments of God. 
 If they choose to be ruled more after the ordinance of sinful men and 
 idiots, than after the clean ordinance of Christ ; and say that sinful man's 
 ordinance is better, and truer for man, and more perfect than is the clean 
 ordinance of Christ — then they worship false gods, and are heretics and 
 blasphemers, and so they break the first commandment of God. If they 
 dread more, and punish more for breaking of sinful man's traditions, than 
 for breaking the commandments of God ; and study and love more their 
 private rules, than the bests of God, then they worship, love, and dread- 
 sinful man, and, it may be damned devils, more than God Almighty — for, 
 as Austin saith, a man maketh that thing his God the which he dreadeth 
 most and loveth most. 
 
 ' If they hinder curates and poor priests from teaching man God's law, 
 by hypocrisy and help of Antichrist's laws, for dread lest their hypocrisy 
 be perceived, and their winning and worldly pride laid down, they are 
 cursed manquellers, and the cause of the damnation of all the souls that 
 perish through their default in not knowing and keeping God's command- 
 ments. If they preach principally for worldly muck and vainglory, and 
 so preach to be praised of men, and not simply and plainly the Gospel of 
 Christ for his glory, and gaining of men's souls, they are corrupters of 
 God's word, as Paul saith'.'' 
 
 Another matter of large public importance which claimed 
 the Eeformer's attention concerned the exactions of Eome, 
 and the true relations of the temporal and spiritual powers. 
 John of England had covenanted to pay 1000 marks per 
 annum as his vassal tribute to Eome. It was paid at 
 intervals, but Edward III. when he came of age formally 
 discontinued it. In 1365 Urban V. was foolish enough to 
 demand payment with arrears. The demand was laid before 
 Parliament and sternly rejected by a unanimous decision of 
 the Lords spiritual and temporal and the Commons, to the 
 effect that King John had acted entirely beyond his right in 
 subjecting his country and people to such a feudal superiority 
 without their own consent. They further declared, that in 
 case the Pope should carry out any hostile procedure against 
 ' Tracts and Treatises, Lond. 1845, p. S. 
 
282 JOHN WYCLTF. 
 
 the King, they would place the whole powers and resources 
 of the nation at the disposal of the monarch for the defence 
 of his crown and dignity. 
 
 Wyclif, already at this time a celebrated man and a 
 Koyal Chaplain, struck into the controversy and struck home. 
 His discussion of the Papal claim is thrown into the form 
 of a report of sundry speeches, purporting to have been 
 delivered by certain Lords in a debate, presumably in Par- 
 liament. If these speeches were, in substance, actually spoken 
 in the Council, as is the opinion expressed by Dr. Vaughan 
 in his most valuable Wyclif publications,-' the fact would 
 make Wyclif, among other things, a kind of father of 
 Parliamentary reporting. In his tract seven Lords are re- 
 presented as bringing forward seven different reasons for 
 rejecting the Pope's demand, while Wyclif sums up the 
 controversy in his own person, deciding that the agreement 
 made by John was both immoral and without authority. 
 
 At a subsequent period grave disputes arose between 
 Edward and the Pope about "' provisors,' by means of which 
 the Pope secured for his creatures the richest emoluments 
 of the Anglican Church. Wyclif was on the embassy sent 
 to discuss it with Gregory XL, and at Bruges, where they 
 met the Papal delegates, he saw with that keen eye of 
 his something of the inner working of the Papal system. 
 
 Again at a yet later date this same question in a some- 
 what different form presented itself for discussion ; and 
 there exists among the tracts of Wyclif one headed ' Answer 
 of Master John Wyclif to the question given below : it was 
 propounded to him by our lord the King of England, 
 Richard the Second, and hj his great Council, in the first 
 
 ' Life and Opinions of Wydiffe, Lond. 1S34 ; and John de Wydijfe, a Mono- 
 graph, Lond. 1853. [The same opinion is held by Dr. Leohler in his more 
 recent study of Wyclif, and by his translator Dr. Lorimer. See John Wiclif 
 and Ms EiKjlish Precursors, Lond. 1878. I., p. 247. Ed.] 
 
DEFENCE OF THE BIGHTS OF THE CROWN. 283 
 
 year of his reign.' '^ The question concerned the right of 
 the Crown to impound and apply to national exigencies 
 English money which was claimed by, and on its way to, 
 the Pope, and Wyclif, who had already explicitly maintained 
 the right of the secular government to deal with clerks and 
 with their property as subjects of the Crown, now gives 
 his reply to the question of King and Parliament to the 
 effect that ' our kingdom may lawfully keep back and 
 detain their treasure for the defence of itself, in what case 
 soever necessity do require the same.' The answer, which 
 extends to considerable length, is curious because of the 
 scholastic form of part of it, and the free Scriptural tone of 
 the rest. It indicates Wyclif's true place as the great 
 link of connection, intellectually as well as spiritually, be- 
 tween the scholastic age and the age of the Eeformation. 
 In culture and tone of thought he is at once the last of 
 the great schoolmen and the first of the greater Eeformers. 
 Not his terms only but the form of his arguments are 
 strongly scholastic, while he mixes with them pointed and 
 vigorous appeals to the common understanding and the 
 plain meaning of Scripture, which make him the pioneer 
 of the great intellectual movement which was about to 
 shake and to renew the woi'ld. As a specimen of the 
 first it may be interesting to quote the opening sentences 
 with their dry and formal argument, which runs as follows : — 
 
 ' Every natural body bath power given of God to resist against its 
 contrary, and to preserve itself in due estate, as philosophers know very 
 well. Insomuch, that bodies without life are endued with such kind of 
 power (as it is evident) unto whom hardness is given, to resist those 
 things that would break them, and coldness, to withstand the heat that 
 dissolveth them. Forasmuch then, as the kingdom of England (after the 
 manner and phrase of the Scriptures) ought to be one body, and the 
 clergy with the commonalty the members thereof, it seemeth that the 
 same kingdom hath such power given it of God ; and so much the more 
 apparently, by how much the same body is more precious unto God, 
 
 ^Printed in the Fasciculi Zizaniorum, Rolls Series, p. 258. 
 
284 JOHN WYCLIF. 
 
 adorned -witli virtue and knowledge. Forasmuch then as there is no 
 power given of God unto any creature, for any end or purpose, but 
 that he may lawfully use the same to that end and purpose, it 
 foUoweth that our kingdom may lawfully keep back and detain their 
 treasure for the defence of itself, in what case soever necessity do require 
 the same.' 
 
 In other parts of the tract the argument is broad and 
 natural. It is interesting to note that Wyclif supports his 
 assault on Papal greed of wealth and power by a fine quota- 
 tion from St. Bernard, whose constant and unsparing rebukes 
 of the worldliness of the Church of his day have been 
 referred to in a previous Lecture. Wyclif then proceeds : — 
 
 ' From these words of a blessed man whom the whole Church hath agreed 
 to honour, it appears that the Pope has no right to possess himself of the 
 goods of the Church, as though he were lord of them, but that he is to 
 be, with respect to them, as a minister or servant, and the proctor for the 
 poor. And would to God that the same proud and eager desire of 
 authority and lordship, which is now discovered by this seat of power, 
 were aught else but a prelude, preparing the pathway of Antichrist. 
 From the Gospel evident it is, that the children of Christ's kingdom 
 were not produced by such means, but were the fruit of His poverty. His 
 humility, and His suffering of injury.' 
 
 One sees at once where Wyclif stands in the matter of 
 the true relation of the temporal and spiritual powers. The 
 main feature of a ll._hig_Leac hing jj_jiis_^r ank a n,d_£eaxless _ 
 resort_lfl_t he Word of God. , ' To the law and to the testi- 
 mony' is his constant appeal. In all controversies he will 
 ask, Is this in the order of things which Christ set forth 
 in Scripture ? No ? Then it shall have no place among 
 ourselves. Luther himself is not clearer than Wyclif as to 
 the authority and the sufficiency of Scripture, and the com- 
 plete discordance of the whole Church system of those times 
 with the plain teaching of the Divine Word. The follow- 
 ing noble passage illustrates Wyclif's view of the importance 
 of independent study of the Word. We seem to see here 
 the narrow end of the wedge which Luther was to drive 
 
CONSTANT APPEAL TO THE SCRIPTCRES. 285 
 
 liome. Wyclif speaks of those who would reserve the 
 Scriptures as 
 
 'Antichrists, forbidding men to know their belief, and to speak of 
 Holy Writ. For they say openly that secTilar men should not inter- 
 meddle themselves ivith the Gospel, to read it in the mother tongue, but 
 attend to a holy fathei-'s preaching, and -do after such in all things. But 
 this is openly against God's teaching. For God commandeth generally 
 to each layman, that he should have God's commandments before him, 
 and teach them to his children. And Peter biddeth us be ready to give 
 a reason for our faith and hope to each man that asketh it. And God 
 commands His priests to preach the Gospel to each man, as the reason is, 
 because all men should know it. Lord ! why shoiild worldly priests 
 forbid secular men to speak of the Gospel, since God giveth them great 
 wit of kind (by nature) and great desire to know God and love Him ? 
 Since the beginning of the world none have heard higher craft of Anti- 
 christ whereby to destroy Christian men's belief and charity, than is tliis 
 blasphemous heresy — that laymen should not intermeddle with the 
 Gospel.' 1 
 
 "We are not able to trace with any accuracy the course 
 of Wyclif's instruction during his later years at Oxford ; 
 though a fair notion of it may be gathered from a study 
 of his ' Trialogus.' He went on applying the test of the 
 Word of G-od to the principal doctrines and practices of 
 the Church, kindling a burning enthusiasm in the one party, 
 in the other a vehement alarm and hate. About saints' 
 days, for instance, he says, 'Not a few think it would be 
 well for the Church, if all festivals of that nature were 
 abolished, and those only were retained which have respect 
 immediately to Christ.' The most important theological con- 
 troversy in which Wyclif was engaged was that which he 
 carried on with so much vigour and earnestness Jnj3]3positKm_ 
 Jo_the Eomish dogma_j2L_Traiiaubstantiation,_ Wyclif saw 
 clearly what it would be well for us to keep as clearly in 
 sight, that this dogma is at the heart of the sacerdotal 
 power of Eome. Sacerdotalists, if they want to uphold 
 
 1 From the Tract de XXXII hh-rorihus Curatorum, in Vaughan, Jolm de 
 Wycliffe, Lond. 1853, p. 526. 
 
286 JOHN WYCLIF. 
 
 the office and power of the priest, are wise in their genera- 
 tion in maintaining the Eeal Presence ; and in offering 
 their daily sacrifice — theirs, it is neither of the Father, nor 
 of Christ. This is the key to their position ; while this 
 stands they may stand; when this falls, as fall it must, 
 they will fall. But if ' by one offering he hath perfected 
 for ever them that are sanctified,' if ' the just shall' live by 
 faith,' not in the Christ of a priest's incantations, but in 
 the living and reigning Saviour who is in perpetual presence 
 with the believing soul ; if the mission of the Church is to 
 preach ' Christ Jesus, and him crucified, ' then ' the truth 
 as it is in Jesus ' and Sacerdotalism are in deadly antagonism, 
 and if the Gospel is to triumph. Sacerdotalism must wither 
 before it, and perish out of that Christendom which it has 
 done so much in all ages to waste and to destroy. Wyclif 
 saw this and struck at once at the heart of the error of 
 Eome in a series of discourses and controversial papers 
 which may be studied in the ' Tracts and Treatises ' edited 
 by Dr. Vaughan for the Wycliffe Society. 
 
 Before, however, this controversy came to its height, Wyclif 
 had, as we may well imagine, attracted the hostile notice 
 of Eome, and the Pope felt that some action must be 
 taken. Just 500 years ago, in 1377,-' three Bulls were 
 issued, to the King, to the Archbishop, and to the University, 
 commanding that proceedings should be instituted against 
 Wyclif, whose doctrines are thus described in the Bull to 
 Oxford, which Foxe has preserved : — 
 
 ' Grievously it lias come to our ears, that one John "Wyclif, parson of 
 Lutterworth in Lincoln diocese, a professor of Divinitie (would God he 
 ' were not rather a master of errours), is runne into a kind of detestable 
 wiokednesse, not only and openly publishing, but also A'omiting out of 
 the filthy dungeon of his heart, divers professions, false and erroneous 
 conclusions, and most wicked and damnable heresies.'^ 
 
 1 [The lecture was delivered in 1877. — Ed.] 
 ' Foxe, Acts and MommienU, 1C32. I. 563. 
 
CITED ON CHARGES OP HERESY. 287 
 
 Early in the year 1377, Gourtenay, Bishop of London, 
 had cited the Reformer to answer for his heresies. He 
 appeared with John of Gaunt, Lord Percy the Earl Marshal, 
 and a great throng of people. We have already seen enough 
 to explain the sympathy with which Wyclifs views were 
 regarded by laymen in high places. On that occasion, how- 
 ever, the popular feeling was with the bishop. The truth 
 is that John of Gaunt, in the last days of Edward IIL, 
 was in disfavour with the people. He was known to be 
 ambitious and was suspected of designs against the interests 
 of the heir of their darling Black Prince ; John of Gaunt 
 accordingly could lend no strength just then to Wyclifs 
 cause. There was rough recrimination between the bishop 
 and the secular lords, the meeting broke up in confusion, 
 and nothing was done. In 1378, Wyclif was summoned 
 before a synod at Lambeth, and at this meeting the people 
 were tumultuously in his favour. The churchmen were 
 cowed, and when a message came from the Queen Mother 
 forbidding them to do anything against Wyclif, the synod 
 was dissolved and again there was no result — except indeed 
 a valuable paper which he drew up, answering seriatim 
 the charges of heresy, and setting forth his views. After 
 this great strain, the Reformer appears to have fallen ill. 
 The friars, thinking that he was dying, exhorted him to 
 repentance. But he was made of sterner stuff. Imagine 
 their disgust and dread when the sick man, gathering up 
 all his strength, and asking to be raised in bed, exclaimed, 
 ' I shall not die but live, and shall again declare the evil 
 deeds of the friars.' 
 
 There came then, as always comes in great movements, a 
 pause in the onward progress, and there was heard the 
 cry of Halt all along the vanguard of Reform. The misery 
 of the poor broke out into rebellion ; and men connected 
 this with Wyclifs teachings — in one sense, not unjustly. 
 
28 8 JOHN WYCLIF. 
 
 The truth previously indicated, that the friars were a living 
 link of connection between the Middle Age and the preachers 
 of the Eeformation, is further established by the fact, that 
 Wyclif orqanised and trained bands of ' poor priests,' who 
 went about barefoot, staff in hand, everywhere preaching 
 the Gospel — the Methodists of the fourteenth century. The 
 common people heard them gladly — it always does hear 
 such preachers gladly — and their words stirred a great hope 
 in the heart of the starving and wretched poor. Their 
 teaching, though they were no preachers of rebellion, added 
 inevitably to the popular excitement. They were not back- 
 ward — God grant that the vangnaard of the Church may 
 never be backward — in maintaining ' tha cause of tJue afflid&l, 
 and the right of the poor.' To the minds of men in high, 
 and men in safe places, their purely Christian teaching 
 seemed to be in some sinister connection with the popular 
 discontent, and so for a time a cloud gathered round the 
 Ileformer and his work. The University silenced him in 
 1382. A synod was held by the Archbishop of Canterbury 
 in which his tenets were formally condemned. Still, none 
 dared to touch his person, and he retired unharmed to 
 Lutterworth, where the last and the best part of his life's 
 work was done. It is a noble testimony to the temper 
 of England in those days, that he was able to continue 
 this glorious work in peace at his country living, and that 
 he died there peacefully in his bed in 1384. 
 
 A final word on his last and most honourable achieve- 
 ment, his translation of the Bible into the English tongue. 
 A word will be sufficient, as it is the best known and 
 the most valued of all the noble gifts which he bestowed 
 upon the world. Though silenced at Oxford, he continued 
 at Lutterworth to pour forth a copious stream of treatises 
 on every manner of subject connected with the religious 
 instruction and welfare of the people. Incomparably his 
 
TRAXSLATION OF THE BIBLE. 289 
 
 greatest work, however, during these last years was the 
 translation, which with the aid of coadjutors he was able 
 to accomplish, and in part to revise, before his death. In 
 writing of the use of the Scriptures in the vernacular, he 
 utters the following noble vindication of the principles which 
 inspired his own undertaking : — 
 
 ' Seeing the tnitt of the faith shiiies the more by how much more 
 it is known . . . that the truth may be known more plainly and 
 iliffusively, true men are under a necessity of declaring the opinion 
 which they hold, not only in Latin, but in the vnlgar tongue. . . 
 
 Nor are those heretics to be heard who fancy that seculars ought 
 not to know the law of God, but that it is sufficient for them to know 
 what the priests and prelates tell them by word of mouth ; for the 
 Scripture is the faith of the Church, and the more it is known in an 
 orthodox sense the better. Therefore, as secular men ought to know 
 the faith, so it is to be taught them in whatsoever language is best 
 known to them. Besides, since the truth of the faith is clearer and 
 more exact in the Scripture than the priests know how to express it ; 
 seeing, if one may say so, that there are many prelates who are too 
 ignorant of the Scripture, and others conceal points of Scripture, such, 
 to wit, as declare the poverty and humility of the clergy, and that 
 there are many such defects in the verbal instructions of priests, it 
 seems useful that the faithful should themselves search out or discover 
 the sense of the faith, by having the Scriptures in a language which 
 they know and understand. . . The laws, therefore, which the 
 
 prelates make, are not to be received as matters of faith, nor are we 
 to believe their words or discourses any further or otherwise than 
 they are founded in the Scripture, since, according to the constant 
 doctrine of Augustine, the Scripture is all the truth. Therefore this 
 translation of the Scripture would do at least this good, that it would 
 render priests and prelates unsuspected in regard to the words of it, 
 which they profess to explain. Further, prelates, as the pope, or 
 friars, and other means, may prove defective, and Christ and his apostles, 
 accordingly, converted the most part of the world by making known 
 the Scripture in a language which was most familiar to the people. 
 For to this purpose did the Holy Spirit give them the knowledge of 
 all tongues. Why, therefore, ought not the modern disciples of Christ 
 to collect fragments from the same loaf, and after such example open 
 the Scriptures clearly and plainly to the people, that they may know 
 them.' ' 
 
 The toil involved in this work of translation was enormous, 
 
 1 Tracts and Treatises, p. Ixii. 
 T 
 
290 JOHN WYCLIF. 
 
 and there can be no question that it wore his noble life away. 
 His tracts and translations were written in nervous, pithy 
 vernacular, which stamps Wyclif as the true father of English 
 prose. We learn that intense interest was taken in the work 
 by the people, and indeed by all classes. One hundred 
 and seventy MS. copies of his Bible are now extant, many 
 of them bearing the names of the most eminent persons in 
 the realm, amongst them those of four of our kings. 
 Through Anne of Bohemia, Consort^ of Eichard II., the 
 Trac ts and Treati ses were carri ed to . her native land, and 
 lit up there the flame of the Eeformation. In England 
 the translation kindled a light which has never been ex- 
 tinguished, and, thank God, never can be extinguished while 
 England endures. This was Wyclif's grand achievement, 
 his crown of everlasting honour ; and it was at the cost of 
 life that his work was done. On December 29th, 1384, 
 he was struck down by paralysis in his Church at Lutter- 
 worth, and on the 31st he peacefully expired. 
 
 After his death there came an era of reaction, which demands 
 a closing sentence. This reaction may be accounted for in dif- 
 ferent ways. The fact is that the fifteenth century in England 
 was a dark sad age, standing related to the glorious epoch that 
 was to succeed it, much as the eighteenth century is related to 
 this great nineteenth in which, let us thank God, we live and 
 work. ^Ien_Jike_Wyclif are like the fabled ninth wave of 
 the floo d_tidej_they_leave a mark high^ up on the sand ; the 
 nex t wave re cedes^_the_ ^xt, the ne xt ; _._but wait, soon the 
 whole tide will be_up to the limit and beyond. The key to 
 the reaction may be sought, if we will, merely in the natural 
 timorousness and sloth of the mass of mankind. There is, 
 however, in addition to this a nobler reason. Reformation 
 on a great scale is an awful work, and the most earnest feel 
 this, and tremble before it. There exists deep down in the 
 heart of Christian society an uneasy feeling that many things 
 
pb;rmanence of his work. 291 
 
 are wrong, radically wrong, in our attempt at a kingdom of 
 Heaven, and that the righting them will be solemn and costly 
 work ; and so when a great power of God seems to be mani- 
 festing itself, men give pause, not ignobly altogether, but 
 rather as Moses trembled before his mission, appalled by the 
 magnitude of the task. These thoughts and feelings, with 
 other influences that might be adduced, create, so to speak, 
 the atmosphere in which the reactionaries work. In this 
 case, there was a political motif, that was supplied by the 
 defective title to the throne of the Lancastrian kings. Like 
 Louis Napoleon and others of our own time, trembling for 
 their power, they sought the sinister alliance of the Church. 
 Frightened people soon get cruel, and the fires were quickly 
 kindled in which Cobham and other noble martyrs perished. 
 They dug up Wyclif's bones and burned them, and scattered 
 the ashes to the winds and seas. Fools ! The winds and the 
 seas had already fulfilled a benigner ministry ; they had borne 
 his relics, the living germs of his intellect and spirit, and 
 scattered them broadcast through Europe, the vital seeds 
 of a lasting Eeformation ; and what cared he for his 
 bones ? 
 
 Through all the dark times, however, which followed on 
 the age of Wyclif, his work remained as he had left it. There 
 was the Look and the Tracts and Treatises of the Eeformer 
 in vulgar English, the tongue of the great English people, 
 and these kept still glowing the embers which, when the 
 days of the reaction were ended, leapt forth into such brilliant 
 quickening flame. There WAS the Book ! There is the Book ! 
 and while this Book abides the priest can never triumph in 
 Christendom, nor the Gospel perish out of the world. Of 
 all that the Reformation, and the Bible which it has put into 
 the hands of the people, have done for England, we must 
 hold John "Wyclif to be the earthly parent, as fellow-helper 
 on earth with Christ in heaven. The greatest Englishman 
 
292 JOHN WVOLIF. 
 
 of his time, and amongst the greatest of all times, foremost 
 among the world's elect spirits, few even among its saints 
 and martyrs will appear with more abundant honour in the 
 day, when ' Tlw teachers shall shine as the brightness of the 
 firmament ; and they that turn many to righteousness as the 
 stars for ever and ever.' 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Abelard, Peter of, 116, 149; Reformation 
 and, 163 ; St. Bernard and, 150, 151, 
 161 seq. ; scholars of, 166, 278. 
 
 Alexander III., Pope, 195. 
 
 Alfred the Great, 76, 2.52. 
 
 Anacletus II., Pope, 157, 158, 159. 
 
 Anchorites, 106. 
 
 Anne of Bohemia, 290. 
 
 Antisthenes, 12, 30. 
 
 Antoninus Pins, 60. 
 
 Aristophanes, 14. 
 
 Aristotle, 10, 11, 13. 
 
 Arrian, 40. 
 
 Asceticism, Greek, 12, 13 ; Christian, 102 
 seq., 130; St. Bernard on, 156; St. 
 Thomas of Canterbury and, 175. 
 
 Athanasius, 107, 110. 
 
 Athenodorus, 52. 
 
 Athens, i, seq., .53, .58; its philosophical 
 schools, 53. 
 
 Aulus Gellius, 55 ; quoted, 56. 
 
 Avignon, 272, 273. 
 
 Bee, Monastery of, 187. 
 
 Becket, .fee St. Thomas of Canterbury. 
 
 Bede, 136. 
 
 Benedict, Saint, see St. Benedict. 
 
 Benedictines, 110, 121, 226; agriculture 
 
 and, 113 seq. ; education and, 135 ; 
 
 obedience and, 117 seq. 
 Bernard de Quintaville, 218, 232. 
 Bernard, Saint, see St. Bernard. 
 Biscop, Benedict, 136. 
 Bishops, power of, 179. 
 Blanche of Castile, 253. 
 Boethius, 75, 76. 
 Bonaventura, Saint, Life of St. Francis, 
 
 213, 215, 222, 279. 
 Boniface, Saint, 123, 136. 
 Boniface IV., 122. 
 Boniface VIII., 125, 126. 127, 150, 268, 
 
 269, 270, 271. 
 Boniface IX., 182. 
 Bouvines, battle of, 240, 268. 
 
 Carolingian Empire, 123, 244. 
 
 Cassian, quoted, 120. 
 
 Cato the Younger, 52. 
 
 Charlemagne, 241, 243. 
 
 Chaucer, 274, 279. 
 
 Christ, 86 seq. ; asceticism and, 97, 103, 
 104 ; early monastic age and, 96, 119, 
 133. 
 
 Christianity, aim of, 8, 11 ; Alexandrian, 
 88 ; early, its characteristics, 96 seq ; 
 patriotism and, 133 ; Eoman Empire 
 and, 82 ; society and, 4.5, 84 ; Stoicism 
 and, 37, 42 seq., 56 seq. , 73 seq., 83 seq. 
 
 Christendom, Emperor and, 125 ; Pope 
 and, 125 ; supreme head of, 146 seq. : 
 see also Roman See and Roman Empire. 
 
 Chrysippus, 34. 
 
 Cicero, 24. 
 
 Cistercians, agriculture and, 115 ; rule 
 of, 154. 
 
 Citeaux, Monastery of, 154, 155. 
 
 Clairvaulx, formdation of, 156. 
 
 Clara, Santa, see Sta. Clara. 
 
 Clara Vallis, see Clairvaulx. 
 
 Cleanthes, 31, 78. 
 
 Clemens Alexandrimxs, 55. 
 
 Cluny, 165. 
 
 Ccenobites, 106. 
 
 Columbus, 168. 
 
 Campagni, Dino, 269. 
 
 Concordat of Worms, 180. 
 
 Constantine, 125. 
 
 Constitutions of Clarendon, 197. 
 
 Council of Constance, 272, 274 ; of the 
 Lateran, 180: of Sens, 163, 16.5. 
 
 Crusades, influence of, on social life, 248 
 seq. ; St. Bernard and, 167 ; St. Fran- 
 cis and, 229 ; St. Louis and, 255, 259 
 seq., 262. 
 
 Cynics, relation of, to Socrates, 12 ; 
 to Stoics, 29, 30. 
 
 Damietta, St. Francis at, 229. 
 Dante, 12.5, 239, 248, 269. 
 
294 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Diogenes the Cynic, 12. 
 Diogenes Laertius, quoted, 17, 20. 
 Dion Cassius, quoted, 52. 
 DioD Clirysostom, quoted, 53. 
 Dominicans, rule of, 22G ; Papal See 
 and, 226. 
 
 Edward III., 276, 2S1, 282. 
 
 Bightpenny, Osbern, 186. 
 
 Eleanor of Aquitaine, 244, 245. 
 
 England, under Edward III., 276; and 
 monastic orders, 129. 
 
 Epictetus, 55, 59, 95; quoted, 63 ; apathy 
 of, 37 ; Cvnios aad, 29, 38 ; his char- 
 acter, 40 ;" his despair, 47, 63, 84 ; idea 
 of God, 41, 74 ; on immortality, 44 ; 
 on social relations, 45 ; relation of, to 
 Christianity, 57 seq., 64, 73 seq. 
 
 Epicureanism, 7, 10, 14,133; happiness and, 
 15, 29; individualism and, 11, 14, 133; 
 its secret, 25 seij. ; place given by, to 
 sensation, 19, 21, 22; pleasure its 
 aim, 17, 19, 30 ; relation of, to society, 
 23, 33; scepticism and, 15; temperance 
 in pleasure, 19, 20 ; theory of matter, 
 21 ; theory of outward world, 22, 23, 
 31 ; theory of religion, 22, 24 ; theory 
 of virtue, 30. 
 
 Epicurus, 16 seq., 36 ; his character, 16, 
 17, 18, 25 ; his followers, 24, 25 ; his 
 friends, 16, 23 ; letters of, 18, 19 ; St. 
 Paul and, 19, 24. 
 
 Eremites, 106. 
 
 Etampes, Council at, 157. 
 
 Euripides, quoted, 42. 
 
 Eusebius, quoted, 23. 
 
 Fanaticism, 97. 
 
 Feudalism, 246 seq. 
 
 Fitzralph, Archbishop, 280. 
 
 Fontaines, 150, 151. 
 
 Fox, George, 230. 
 
 Francis, Saint, sec St. Francis. 
 
 Franciscan Order, 214 ; institution of, 
 
 221 sc^. ; Order of Penitence, 230 ; 
 
 Papal See and, 226, 228 ; rule of, 226. 
 Frederick Barbarossa, Emperor, 125, 178. 
 Frederic II., Emperor, 220, 238. 
 Friars, see Mendicant Orders. 
 Fulda, 123, 135. 
 
 Garden, The, of Epicm-us, 17, 18, 19. 
 
 Godfrey of Boviillon, 168. 
 
 Greece, relation of, to Renaissance, 35 ; 
 
 to Rome, 35 seq. 
 Gregory the Great, 125, 126, 134. 
 Gregory VII., 150, 178, 220, 267, 272. 
 Gregory IX., see Ugoliuo. 
 Gregory XI., 282. 
 Grossetete, Bishop, 273, 275. 
 
 Happiness, its place in Aristotle's i^hil- 
 osophy, 10 ; in later Greek philosophy, 
 10, 14, 29. 
 
 Harding, Stephen, 1.54, 155. 
 
 Hegel, 103. 
 
 Henry I., 157, 158. 
 
 Henry II., 144, 182, 187 seq., 244, 245. 
 Henry IV., Emperor, 182. 
 Henry V., Emperor, 183. 
 Hildebrand, see Gregory VII. 
 
 Individualism, Greek, 8 seq. ; Jewish, 8 ; 
 
 necessity of, 10, 11. 
 Innocent II., Pope, 157 sei/. 
 Innocent III., Pope, 142, 204, 205, 206, 
 
 208 ; dominion of, 220 seq., 267 seq. 
 Innocent IV., Pope, 273. 
 Investitures, 180. 
 
 John, King, 245, 267, 268, 281. 
 
 John XXIII. , Pope, 274. 
 
 John of Gaunt, 287. 
 
 John of St. Paul, 222. 
 
 Joinville de Champagne, 251, 252, 
 
 quoted, 257, 258, 260, 261, 262. 
 Juilly, Nunnery of, 154. 
 
 Lactantius. quoted, 26. 
 
 Lanfranc, 182. 
 
 Languedoc, heresy in, 223, 245 ; in 12th 
 
 century, 160. 
 Leontium, 17, 18. 
 Libanius, quoted, 54. 
 Lothair II., Emperor, 157, 158. 
 Louis IX., sec St. Louis, 
 Louis le Gros, 157, 244. 
 Lucian, quoted, 25, 51, 52. 
 Lucretius, 16, 24 
 Lutterworth, 279, 288. 
 
 Marcus Aurelius, 56, 73 ; approximation 
 to Christianity, 56 seq., 62, 64, 74 seq. ; 
 attitude towards Christians, 78, 80, 
 178 ; despair of, 87 ; his character, 59, 
 60; his teachers, 61; Meditations, 
 quoted, 61 seq., 75. 
 
 Margaret of Provence, 254. 
 
 Maurice, Emperor, 134. 
 
 Mendicant Orders, 141, 142, 143, 177, 208, 
 210, 279, 280 : sec also Dominicons and 
 Franciscans. 
 
 Middle Ages, 99, 100 ; formation of Chris- 
 tian Society in, 101, 102; growth of 
 nations in, 206, 240, 242 ; learning of, 
 160, 206, 246, 271 ; secular life and, 
 246 seq., 271 : sec also Monachism. 
 
 Monachism, 97 seq. ; beginnings of, 106, 
 110, 120 ; chronicles and, 1 36 ; domestic 
 affections and, 130 seq. ; Eastern, 102, 
 106 seq., 110, 113 ; England and, 129 ; 
 its activities, 112 ; its influence on 
 society, 99 seq., 108, 111, 114, 120, 128 
 seg.,134; its root idea, 105; organisation 
 and, 121, 129 ; relation of, to church, 
 100, 120 seq. ; secular society and, 134 
 seq. ; Western, 109, 110, 113. 
 
 Monks, and bishops, 121, 122; clerics, 
 122; laymen, 120 ; learning of, ]34seg'. ; 
 missionary work of, 128, 210 ; relation 
 of, to Abbot, 119 ; relation of, to Pope, 
 122 seq. 
 
 Monte Cassino, 112, 116. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 295 
 
 Nicholas I. , Pope, 126. 
 Numenius, quoted, 23. 
 
 Occam, 277, 278. 
 
 Otho, Emperor, 220, 268. 
 
 Oxford, University of, 277, 278. 
 
 Pansetius of Rhodes, 36. 
 
 Paris, 248. 
 
 Paris, Matthew, quoted, 275. 
 
 Pascal II. , Pope, 183. 
 
 Pax Romaua, 59, 128. 
 
 Pepin, 123. 
 
 Pericles, 53. 
 
 Persius, 58. 
 
 Peter the Venerable, 165. 
 
 Petrarch, 148, quoted, 273. 
 
 Petronius, quoted, 53. 
 
 Philip Augustus, 240, 244, 248, 268. 
 
 Philip le Bel, 126, 240, 269, 270, 272. 
 
 Philosophers, Greek, in Rome, .51 scq. 
 
 PhUusophy, Christianity and, 55, 57, 73 
 seq.^ S3 seq. ; early, its cosmological 
 theories, 3, 4 ; of the Sects, see Cynics, 
 Sceptics, Stoics, Epicureans ; Roman, 
 35 seq. ; Socratic, centred in man, 4, 
 seq. 
 
 Plato, 11, quoted, 131. 
 
 Poitiers, "William, Count of, 159. 
 
 Portiuncula, church of, 217, 226, 228. 
 
 Provence, heresy in, 24.5; in 12th century, 
 160. 
 
 Pyrrho of Elis, 12, 13, 14. 
 
 Richer of Laigle, 186. 
 
 Roman Church and the Middle Ages, 147, 
 148, 176 ; attitude of, towards heresy, 
 80; celibacy of its clergy, 272. 
 
 Roman Empire, 79 seq. ; Eastern, 242 ; 
 dualism in, 242 seq. ; idea of unity and, 
 126, 241 ; Holy, 125, 240 seq. 
 
 Roman See, Christendom and, 148, 176, 
 224 ; decay of, 268 seq. ; dominion of, 
 220, 267 seq. ; growth of its power, 126 
 seq. 
 
 Rome, and Cliristians, 79 ; later days of, 
 79 ; mona<;hism in, 110 ; relation of, to 
 Greece, 35 ; under early Caesars, 58 ; 
 under Marcus Aurelius, 59. 
 
 Saracens, St. Francis and, 229. 
 
 Sceptics, happiness and, 10, 14 ; rela- 
 tion of, to Socrates, 12. 
 
 Scutage, 189. 
 
 Seneca, 51 ; despair of, 58, 87 ; Epicurus 
 and, 16, 36 ; his character, 39, 58, 82 ; 
 on function of philosophy, 37 ; on im- 
 mortality, 44; relation of, to Chris- 
 tianity, .57, 62, 73 sey. 
 
 Sens, CounoU of, 163, 165. 
 
 Simeon Stylites, 107, 108. 
 
 Simon de Montfort, 223. 
 
 Socrates, 3 se?., 12, 29. 
 
 St. Bernard, quoted by AVyclif, 284; 
 and crusades, 145, 150, 151, 167 seg. ; 
 and his family, 151 seq. ; and Papal 
 
 See, 148, 158 ; and persecution of Jews, 
 169; and Peter Abelard, 160 se^.; 
 compared with St, Francis, 142 seq.; 
 compared with St. Thomas, 144 seq. ; 
 death of, 170 ; events of his hfe, 151 
 seq. ; founds Clairvaulx, 155 ; hia 
 asceticism, 99, 155, 156 ; his personal 
 influence, 149 ; the monastic saint, 144. 
 
 St. Benedict, 99, 110, 111, 116, 118 ; his 
 life. 111 seq. ; his rule, 112, 113 seq. 
 
 Sta. Clara, 228. 
 
 St. Clare, Order of, 228. 
 
 St. Dominic, 209. 
 
 St. Francis, 96, 99, 142, 143, 203, 205 : 
 asceticism of, 227 ; as missionary. 228, 
 230; death of, 231 seq. ; eventsof his life, 
 206, 210 seq., 226, 230 ; his character, 
 211 seq., 227, 232; Order of Penitence, 
 230 ; and Pope, 220 seq. ; and poverty, 
 214, 220 ; his visions, 213, 214, 219, 231, 
 232. 
 
 St. Louis, 242, 245; as Crusader, 255, 259 
 seq., 262; as king, 256 seq. ; as secular 
 saint, 237 seq., 246, 250; attitude of, to- 
 wards heretics, 245, 2.54; character of, 
 245, 252, 254, 260 seq. ; death of, 263 ; 
 events of his life, 238, 251. 
 
 St. Paul, 19, 24. 66, 75, 76, quoted, 238. 
 
 St. Thomas of Canterbury, 173, 203, 204, 
 205, 220; as Archbishop, 191 siq. ; as 
 Chancellor, 187 seq. ,190; as eoclesiA.stic, 
 143 seq., 176 seq., 193 seq. ; birth and 
 education, 185 seq. ; Church and King, 
 176 seq. ; bis asceticism, 175 ; his iitti- 
 tude to Roman See, 1 95 ; his character, 
 174, 175, 185, 191, 1 93 ; his death, 198 ; 
 struggle with the King, UI2 seq. 
 
 Stephen, King, 179, 187, 1K8. 
 
 Stoicism, 7, 10, 14 ; apathy of, 33, 37, 
 38 ; asceticism of, 29 ; Christianity 
 and, 37, 39, 42 seq., 56 seq., 73; Greeks 
 and, 34 ; happiness and, 15, 29 ; 
 idea of God, 30 seq., il, 62, 88 ; immor- 
 tality and, 44, 67 ; individualism and, 
 11, 14, 133 ; its weakness, .33, 45, 46, 
 87 sej. ; Kature and, 32; Romans and, 
 35 seq., 57 seq., 73 seq. ; relation of, to 
 society, 23, 32 seq. , 45, 65 ; scepticism 
 and, 15 ; theory of virtue, 30, 37. 
 
 Subiaco, 111, 112. 
 
 Suger of St. Denis, 170. 
 
 Tacitus, 53. 
 
 Taiu-us, 5.5, 56. 
 
 Tesselin, 151, 152. 
 
 Tliales 4. 
 
 Thebai'd, The, 107, 110. 
 
 Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 
 187, 191. 
 Theophrastus, 54. 
 Thomas Aquinas, 210. 
 Thomas of Celano, quoted, 227. 
 Tracts and Treatises of Wyclif, 286 290, 
 
 291. 
 
 Ugolino, Cardinal, 228. 
 
296 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Universities, Ancient, 53, 54, 56 ; in 13th 
 century, 277, 278 ; and Mendicant Or- 
 ders, 280. 
 
 Urban V., Pope, 281. 
 
 ViUani, John, 269. 
 
 Walter of Erienne, 213. 
 
 William of Champeaux, 155. 
 
 William of Nogaret, 270. 
 
 WiUiam of St. Thierry, 1.52, 155, 164. 
 
 William Rufus, 182. 
 
 Wyclif, John, 142, 270, 276 ; and Mendi- 
 cant Orders, 280 seq., 287 ; and the 
 Pope, 286; and Romish exactions, 281 ; 
 and Transubstantiation, 285 seq. ; at 
 Oxford, 277 seq., 288; death of, 290; 
 his poor priests, 288 ; his work of trans- 
 lation, 289 seq. ; Tracts and Treatises, 
 286, 290, 291. 
 
 Zeno, 30, 133. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 riLASGOW : PRINTED AT THE UNIVEr.SITV PRESS, BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE. 
 
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THEOLOGICAL CATALOGUE 9 
 
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